Atari

USA · Founded 1972 · Developer / Publisher / Hardware Manufacturer

Atari invented the commercial video game industry with Pong (1972) and the Atari 2600 home console, dominating the market until mismanagement and the crash of 1983 ended its leadership.

Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in Sunnyvale, California in June 1972, weeks before launching Pong — a coin-operated table tennis game with no instruction manual beyond "avoid missing ball for high score." Pong was not the first video game, but it was the first commercially successful arcade game, and Atari's aggressive expansion through the mid-1970s turned the company into an industry. Al Alcorn engineered the original Pong hardware. The Atari 2600, launched in 1977, introduced the concept of interchangeable ROM cartridges to home gaming, allowing a console to play dozens of different games for the first time. Warner Communications bought Atari in 1976 for $28 million; by 1982, the company was worth over $2 billion. The collapse came swiftly: flooded with licensed shovelware, burned by the notorious E.T. game, and outmanoeuvred by a resurgent Nintendo, Atari never recovered its dominant position after 1983.