If he's talking about the arcade game, I find that HIGHLY doubtful. Did he give you a source for the info or the name of anyone at Atari who worked on it?
None of the Atari people I talked to ever mentioned Zaxxon, nor have I ever heard any of them mention it in the hundreds of interviews they've done. It wasn't mentioned in Goldberg and Vendel's Atari, Inc and I don't recall reading it in any other book on Atari or on video game history that I've read (and I've read almost all of them).
AFAIK, this isn't mentioned in any of the thousands of pages of internal documents that have been found for Atari (including meeting notes, design documents, field test reports, and proposals for dozens of released and unreleased games).
Plus, the copyright applications for the game identify Ikegami Tsushinki as the author of the "entire text of the computer program", so it appears that they programmed it (yes, someone likely farmed the work out to them, but I think it's much more likely it was Sega than Atari since I've never heard that they did work for US companies - plus Atari had plenty of capable programmers of its own).
http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pw...cdtCNTO3hcDeGZbNlQR5&SEQ=20141208194058&SID=1
While I have never heard any of the designers identified, I don't think that anyone at Atari was involved.
Turbosub.com mentions that Ulrich Neumann worked on the game's hardware while he was at Gremlin, but it isn't clear what his role was or if he worked with Sega Japan.
I think we need a lot more evidence before we can say that Atari designed the coin-op version of Zaxxon or that they licensed it to Sega.
Maybe they were involved with testing the game or making the cabinets (though I doubt that too).
Keith Smith
allincolorforaquarter.blogspot.com
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