It does not make any kind of business sense to spend that much money and rely on 1 programmer and such a short project time. What happened if the programmer fell down some stairs or got hit by a bus? Normal project time for a game was 6 to 8 months, they gave this guy 5 weeks and no team. Obviously the programmer should never have agreed to the time frame, but he was 24 and at that age nothing seems impossible. This was not his fault, but shows a shocking lack of planning and communication within Atari at that time.