Atari

Atari is a brand in interactive entertainment, consumer hardware, and licensing that originated with Atari, Inc., an American company founded in 1972 that pioneered arcade games, home video game consoles, and home computers.¹³¹⁶ The name has passed through several corporate owners since; it is currently held by the French holding company Atari SA, headquartered at 78 rue Taitbout in Paris.¹ Across its history the brand has amassed a portfolio of more than 200 games and franchises, including Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, and Pong.⁴

Origins

The company grew out of the work of Nolan Bushnell?, born in 1943 in Clearfield, Utah, who studied electrical engineering at Utah State University and was exposed there to a DEC PDP-1 running Steve Russell’s 1962 game Spacewar!.¹³ Working his way through college at Lagoon Amusement Park, Bushnell conceived of monetizing computer games in coin-operated cabinets.¹³ After graduating he moved to California and joined Ampex, where he met future partner Ted Dabney?.¹³ Their first collaboration, a Spacewar!-derived arcade game called Computer Space, was licensed to Nutting Associates in 1971 but failed commercially, in part because it required players to read instructions.¹²¹⁴

Bushnell and Dabney founded Atari, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California? in June 1972, adopting the name after their first choice, “Syzygy,” proved unavailable.¹⁴¹⁶ “Atari” is a term from the board game Go?, a check-like position warning that a stone is in danger of capture; Bushnell, a Go player, chose it to evoke a move that seizes the initiative.¹²²⁰ The company’s three-part triangular logo, commonly called the “Fuji,” resembled a stylized mountain.¹³

An early employee, Al Alcorn?, was assigned as a test project to program a table-tennis game modeled on the one in Ralph Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey; the result, Pong, proved so engaging that Atari pursued it as a product.¹² The first Pong cabinet — built from a black-and-white television, a laundromat coin mechanism, and a milk carton to catch coins — was placed at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale in 1972, where its coin box jammed with quarters.¹²¹⁴ By 1973 eight to ten thousand units had been made, more than three times a typical pinball run.¹⁴

Dabney, alarmed at mounting competition, sold his half of the company to Bushnell and left in 1973.¹⁴¹⁶ To circumvent distributor-exclusivity networks, Bushnell formed the ostensibly rival firm Kee Games in 1973, named for his friend Joe Keenan; its 1974 game Tank, invented by Steve Bristow, was a major success, after which Atari absorbed Kee Games and made Keenan president.¹²¹⁴ That same year Alcorn built Home Pong, a dedicated console, which Atari demonstrated in 1975 and distributed exclusively through Sears, selling some 150,000 units.¹⁴

Warner era and the golden age

Seeking funds to finish “Stella,” a prototype cartridge-based console developed in response to Fairchild’s Channel F, Bushnell sold Atari, Inc. to Warner Communications? in October 1976 for about $28 million, remaining chairman while Keenan stayed on as president.¹⁴¹⁶ Warner subsequently invested heavily in the machine.¹⁴ Atari released the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) in 1977 at a suggested price of $200, initially with nine games that were home versions of its arcade titles.¹⁴¹⁶ The console — later nicknamed the Atari 2600 — went on to sell millions of cartridges over some fifteen years, with more than 500 games eventually available for it.¹⁶

Atari’s arcade output through this period included Breakout (1976), designed with input from Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak; Lunar Lander and Asteroids (both 1979); Missile Command and Battlezone (1980); and Centipede and Tempest (1981).¹²¹⁴ Asteroids became a major hit, reaching some 70,000 units and dethroning Taito’s Space Invaders in arcades.¹⁴ Bushnell arranged to leave in 1978 amid disagreements with Warner over the company’s direction, and Ray Kassar took over as chief executive, shifting the focus from development toward marketing and sales.¹⁴¹⁶ Bushnell’s separate venture, the Pizza Time Theatre chain that became Chuck E. Cheese, was owned by Atari from 1977.¹²¹⁶

The VCS boom peaked around 1982, when Atari reported profits exceeding $300 million; a group of legislators pointing to the company as a model for a high-technology economy were dubbed “Atari Democrats”.⁵ The home port of Namco’s Pac-Man in 1982, though the best-selling VCS title, was criticized as markedly inferior to the arcade version, damaging Atari’s reputation.¹² The Atari 5200, released in 1982 and based on the Atari 400 home computer, sold poorly and was incompatible with existing 2600 games.¹²¹⁶

Crash, sale, and later ownership

Beginning in late 1982 the market collapsed as demand dried up and retailers were left with unsold inventory, contributing to the video game crash of 1983.⁵¹⁶ Atari’s losses in 1983 totaled $538 million, and Kassar was forced out in July of that year.⁵ On July 2, 1984, having tried for eighteen months to rebuild the business, Warner sold most of Atari to a new company headed by Jack Tramiel?, the former head of Commodore International? whose price-cutting had helped bury Atari; Warner received $240 million in long-term notes and warrants for a 32 percent stake rather than cash.⁵⁶ The sale transferred the “Atari” name and Fuji logo in the home computer and home video game markets to Tramiel’s Tramel Technology Ltd., which became Atari Corporation.⁶

Warner retained the coin-operated games division and the Ataritel telecommunications unit; the retained company was renamed Atari Games, Inc..⁶ Atari Games later created the subsidiary Tengen in 1987, its name meaning “the origin of heaven,” the center point of a Go board.²⁰ The coin-operated copyrights, trademarks, and patents secured by Namco from Warner in 1985, together with Atari Games intellectual property created between 1985 and 2000, eventually came to reside in the Midway Games West subsidiary of Midway Games.⁶

Atari Corporation, a pioneer in home video games, agreed in 1996 to merge with the disk-drive maker JTS Corporation in a stock swap worth about $75 million, with Atari shareholders owning 60 percent of the combined entity but JTS executives in control.⁹ On February 23, 1998, JTS sold substantially all of the Atari assets — chiefly the home computer games and associated intellectual property and license agreements — to HIAC XI Corp., a subsidiary of Hasbro Interactive, for $5 million in cash.³⁸

The Atari brand and franchises subsequently passed to the French publisher Infogrames?, under which the company was structured as Atari SA, a French société anonyme registered in Paris.⁶¹⁰ In 2012 the company marked its 40th anniversary, describing itself as a multi-platform interactive entertainment and licensing company with offices in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Lyon, and London.⁴ Under Atari SA the brand has continued to license its catalog and to release retro hardware, including the Atari 2600+ and Atari 7800+ plug-and-play consoles and the Atari VCS, alongside publishing labels such as Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse.²¹⁷

Atari 2600+ - Official Announcement TrailerIGN