Comment by mgkimsal

It was a good buy for folks who got in early to build software/games for it. Friend of family was building games in 1982/1983 and had some early clones of games out (pacman, centipede, frogger clones, etc) and... while there were a lot of early publishers, it was fairly cheap to do in the early days, and they made more than enough to justify the $595 price (multiple units, IIRC).