A collection of original drawings and corporate presentation materials from a 1979 Atari proposal to integrate interactive gaming into McDonald's restaurants will be offered at auction by New Hampshire-based NobleSpirit on November 19, 2026. The archive, preserved for nearly five decades by former Atari executive Roger Hector, reveals early concepts such as interactive drive-through displays, children's ordering counters, and an overhead arcade game featuring Ronald McDonald. The sale highlights a little-known chapter in video game history and underscores how early industry pioneers sought to apply game technology beyond the arcade and living room.
Hector, who served as Manager of Advanced Products at Atari from 1976 to 1981, personally developed the concepts before presenting them to McDonald's executives at the company's Chicago headquarters. The surviving archive includes 10 original concept drawings, technical design materials, an internal Atari corporate proposal, and a presentation box marked "McDonald's / Atari 1979." According to Hector, the presentation boxes were deliberately designed to resemble McDonald's food packaging, providing a distinctive introduction to his proposals. The collection also includes an Atari Touch Me electronic game—one of two games Steve Jobs helped produce during his time at Atari—and an original signed letter of provenance from Hector.
One proposal envisioned children receiving tokens with their food orders that could be used to play arcade games within the restaurant. Other designs explored integrating electronic entertainment directly into restaurant fixtures and customer interactions, such as a touch-screen counter where kids could order their own food and receive a token to play massive games hanging from the ceiling. Hector recalls that elements of the children's counter concept were adopted in limited test markets, though the broader collection of interactive entertainment proposals was not implemented as originally envisioned.
"The idea came from Atari Marketing. It was the summer of 1979 and I was recruited to come up with some entertaining promotional objects to 'gamify' McDonald's…and give us a connection there," Hector said in a statement. "We prototyped a couple of the concepts, gave them to McDonald's, and they liked 'em a lot. But the negotiations fell apart…and we moved on and I kept one of the McDonald's presentation boxes and all of my original artwork in my portfolio. They have never been seen otherwise until now."
The archive is offered as Lot 9 in The Roger Hector Archives Part I, with a pre-auction estimate of $4,000–$6,000. It is surrounded by 63 other lots of nostalgia from Sonic to Pac-Man, many providing insight into the artistic process of an industrial designer turned video game pioneer at Atari, Electronic Arts, Bally, Disney, Sega Technical Institute, and Namco. The auction will take place November 19, 2026, at 7 p.m. Eastern, with online bidding available through LiveAuctioneers. For more information, visit https://www.noblespirit.com/roger-hector-liveauctioneers-sale.
The public can view many more of Hector's original project artwork at a showing in the NobleSpirit room of the Spellman Museum on Friday, November 13, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 241 Wellesley Street, Weston, MA 02493. The auction and exhibition are significant for collectors and historians of the gaming industry, as they document an early attempt to merge video game technology with everyday consumer experiences. Although Atari and McDonald's later participated in other video game-related promotions, the 1979 presentation documents a previously unknown effort to embed interactive entertainment into the physical restaurant environment. The materials offer a rare window into the creative process of a pioneering designer and the broader ambitions of Atari during a formative era of electronic entertainment.
