Fifty years of Atari

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It slipped silently by us this week, but Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created Atari Inc on June 27, 1972. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney created Atari Inc on June 27, 1972. The name of the company was inspired by a move in the Japanese board game Go. "Atari" in the game denotes that a player's stones are in risk of being captured by his opponent.



In 1971, Bushnell and Dabney released Computer Space, the first commercial arcade video game. The following year, they founded Atari and hired design engineer Al Alcorn, who later designed Pong, the first commercially successful game.

The business was in charge of developing the Atari VCS (Atari 2600), an innovative machine that introduced video games into many homes for the first time. Because of the VCS's success, the market became oversaturated with games, many of which were of poor quality. This, along with big self-published flops like ET and Pac-Man, meant that the VCS was primarily to blame for the 1983 North American gaming crash. The Atari 5200, 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar were all somewhat successful platforms. The Atari ST computer performed significantly better, but it was outsold by its competitor, the Commodore Amiga.

In 2001, Infogrames purchased the company and said that it would "reinvent" the brand, and the company changed its name to Atari SA in 2009. Atari has launched a return attempt with a variety of projects since then, after declaring bankruptcy in 2013 and going quiet.The corporation intends to develop a chain of Atari hotels, and it also released a new console called the Atari VCS in 2021, which failed to catch on. The brand will be indelibly connected with a variety of renowned arcade games that lay the framework for subsequent firms, including not only Pong, but Breakout, Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, and Tempest.

Fifty years of Atari


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