Ray Kassar

Raymond Edward Kassar (January 2, 1928 – December 10, 2017) was an American business executive who served as president, and later CEO, of Atari Inc. from 1978 to 1983. He had previously been executive vice-president of Burlington Industries, the world's largest textile company at the time, and president of its Burlington House division.

Career Ray Kassar began working for Burlington Industries in 1948 and later became the executive vice-president of the company and president of its Burlington House division. A member of the Board of Directors, Kassar spent 26 years at Burlington before he left the company to start his own textile company that manufactured cotton shirts in Egypt and marketed them under the "Kassar" label.

Kassar was hired in February 1978 as president of Atari's consumer division by Warner Communications, who at the time owned Atari. By this time, rifts had begun to develop between the original Atari Inc. staff (most of whom had engineering backgrounds) and the new hires brought in by Warner (who, like Kassar, mostly had business backgrounds).

In November 1978, when Atari Inc. co-founder Nolan Bushnell was fired after a dispute with Warner over the future of Atari Inc., Kassar became CEO. Kassar's experience at Burlington Industries had given him a taste for order, organization, and efficiency, and his efforts to revamp Atari along similar lines provoked substantial animosity. Atari Inc. began to promote games all year around instead of just at the Christmas season. Kassar became derisively known to many at Atari Inc. as the "sock king" and the "towel czar" (due to his previous years in the textile industry) after he once referred to Atari programmers as "high-strung prima donnas" in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News in 1979. Kassar's response to Ross's query of how he liked the idea of making an E.T. based video game was, "I think it's a dumb idea. We've never really made an action game out of a movie."

Upon Kassar's resignation, James J. Morgan, formerly of Philip Morris, replaced him as CEO of Atari Inc. in September 1983.

He was a collector and private investor and sat on the Board of the American Hospital of Paris Foundation.

From December 2, 2000 until February 11, 2001, a series of photographs culled from Kassar's significant personal collection were on display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. The exhibition, entitled "Painterly Photographs: The Raymond E. Kassar Collection", presented 33 works made for exhibition from 1900 to 1910, featuring some of the most important camera artists of the time, including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Heinrich Kuehn, George Seeley and Clarence H. White. Portions of the collection have been lent on only two other occasions, in 1994 to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and in 2012 to the Neue Galerie New York.