Warner Communications

Exactly.

You know, there's a great biography by an investigative journalist, Connie Brook, on Stephen Ross, the head of Warner Communications at the time, which was Atari's parent, that discusses this time period and does a pretty deep dive on Atari because Atari was the tail wagging the dog of Warner Communications for a couple of years here in the early 80s.

And Connie actually got a hold of some of the – there was an SEC investigation after Atari went south.

Shareholders sued.

It was almost immediate.

So just to give a little more context on that.

Warner Communications was a darling of the stock market.

And the reason for that is that for 30 consecutive quarters, they grew more than In the current quarter than the previous comparable quarter.

Atari's making money hand over fist 'cause the, the Atari VCS 2600, they are, uh, printing money.

They're still owned by Warner Communications and-

W- th- they actually are just bought by Warner Communications.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Well, in order to make, um, what was going to be ...

Well, what was the demo that basically showed you what it, what turns out to be the DVD? Um, the Magilla system, the internal secret project at, at Warner Brothers that was shown all over Warner Brothers, all, and several places in the world, and, and helped me meet, um- Steve Ross, who created Warner Communications, and then he invites Steven Spielberg to go see it, which was, um ...

Big company, a lot of money.

But if they'd done it with Warner Communications, then Atari would be back with Warner Communications.

That would have been more emotionally satisfying, I think.

Yeah, it would be, but...

So it was not going well.

And Warner Communications execs decided that maybe, instead, DC should go back to having the same number of pages as their competitors.

However, they were going to raise the price to 40 cents instead of 35.

We'll keep it the exact same but charge them more.

We had tried to do a leveraged buyout in the last days.

We tried to buy the company ourselves because we were owned by Warner Communications and American Express.

American Express wanted out.

Warner Communications was suffering because of the Atari debacle.

They had to sell stuff.

So they wanted to sell us.