Prior to 1982, Activision was one of only a handful of third parties publishing games for the Atari VCS. The others included Imagic, Games by Apollo, Coleco, Parker Brothers, CBS Video Games, and Mattel. By 1982, Activision's success emboldened numerous other competitors to penetrate the market. However, Activision's founder David Crane observed that several of these companies were supported by venture capitalists attempting to emulate the success of Activision. Without the experience and skill of Activision's team, these inexperienced competitors mostly created games of poor quality. Crane notably described these as "the worst games you can imagine". While Activision's success could be attributed to the team's existing familiarity with the Atari VCS, other publishers had no such advantage. They largely relied on industrial espionage (poaching each other's employees, reverse-engineering each other's products, etc) in their attempts to gain market share. In fact, even Atari themselves engaged in such practices, hiring several programmers from Mattel's Intellivision development studio, prompting a lawsuit that included charges of industrial espionage.