Atari Inc.

The **Atari, Inc.** was an American video game and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Primarily responsible for the formation of the video arcade and modern video game industries, the company was closed and its assets split in 1984 as a direct result of the North American video game crash of 1983.

## Origins

In 1966, Nolan Bushnell saw Spacewar! for the first time at the University of Utah. Deciding there was commercial potential in a coin-op version, several years later he and Ted Dabney worked on a hand-wired custom computer capable of playing it on a black and white television in a single-player mode where the player shot at two orbiting UFOs. The resulting game, Computer Space, was released by a coin-op game company, Nutting Associates.

Computer Space did not fare well commercially when it was placed in Nutting's customary market, bars. Feeling that the game was simply too complex for the average customer unfamiliar and unsure with the new technology, Bushnell started looking for new ideas.

Bushnell and Ted Dabney left Nutting to form their own engineering firm, Syzygy Engineering, and soon hired Al Alcorn as their first design engineer. Initially wanting to start Syzygy off with a driving game, Bushnell had concerns that it might be too complicated for the young Alcorn's first game. In May 1972, Bushnell had seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, which included a tennis game. According to Alcorn, Bushnell decided to have him produce an arcade version of the Odyssey's Tennis game, which would go on to be named Pong. Atari later had to pay Magnavox a licensing fee after the latter sued Atari because of this.

When they went to incorporate their firm that June, they soon found that Syzygy (an astronomical term) already existed in California. Bushnell wrote down several words from the game Go, eventually choosing atari, a term that in the context of the game means a state where a stone or group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent. Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972.

By August 1972, the first Pong was completed. It consisted of a black and white television from Walgreens, the special game hardware, and a coin mechanism from a laundromat on the side which featured a milk carton inside to catch coins. It was placed in a Sunnyvale tavern by the name of Andy Capp's to test its viability, and within only a few days they realized they had a hit.

When they arrived the next morning to fix the machine, they were met by a lineup of people waiting for the bar to open so they could play the game. On examination, the problem turned out to be mundane; the coin collector was filled to overflowing with quarters, and when customers tried to jam them in anyway, the mechanism shorted out.

After talks to release Pong through Nutting and several other companies broke down, Bushnell and his partner Ted Dabney decided to release Pong on their own, and Atari, Inc. was established as a coin-op design and production company.

The third version of the Atari Video Computer System sold from 1980 to 1982
In 1973, Atari secretly spawned a "competitor" called Kee Games, headed by Bushnell's next door neighbor Joe Keenan, to circumvent pinball distributors' insistence on exclusive distribution deals; both Atari and Kee could market (virtually) the same game to different distributors, with each getting an "exclusive" deal. Though Kee's relationship to Atari was discovered in 1974, Joe Keenan did such a good job managing the subsidiary that he was promoted to president of Atari that same year.

In 1975, Bushnell started an effort to produce a flexible video game console that was capable of playing all four of Atari's then-current games. Development took place at an offshoot engineering lab, which initially had serious difficulties trying to produce such a machine. However, in early 1976 the now-famous MOS Technology 6502 was released, and for the first time the team had a CPU with both the high-performance and low-cost needed to meet their needs. The result was the Atari 2600, released in October 1977 as the "Video Computer System", one of the most successful consoles in history.

## Defunct

in the year of 1982 Atari decide to hired Howard Scott Warshaw the creator of *Radiers of the Lost Ark* and *Yars' Revenge* to help him to create an Atari 2600 video game that it was based on the famous film of the same name *E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial* to completed it which the full complete to development is 6 to 7 months, but as for *E.T.* it was 5 week on development to make the deadline that it needed to be rush to Christmas when E.T. on the Atari 2600 is released the gamer, fans of the film and even critics gave an harsh reviews to Atari and then Atari loss about billion dollars that it bankrupted then it happen to the video game crash in 1983, then Atari have no choice to buried all the copy's of the game it cause and sent it to the Alamogordo, New Mexico then E.T. is been marketed as one of the worst video game of all time.

## Appearance

* *Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie* (2014)

## Trivia

* The Atari Inc. is the first video game company in the episode.