Atari · 1982 · Atari 2600
"Have you played Atari today?"
Atari's 1982 brand campaign attempted to make the 2600 synonymous with home video gaming itself — a category-defining move that treated "Atari" as a verb in the same way Xerox and Kleenex had become generic nouns.
Launched at the peak of the Atari 2600's commercial dominance, "Have You Played Atari Today?" was a television-led campaign designed to sustain the brand's momentum as competitors arrived. The campaign leaned on Atari's near-total association with home gaming in the American market — by 1982, more than ten million 2600 consoles had been sold — and tried to make the question rhetorical: of course you had, because home gaming and Atari were the same thing. The campaign ran through 1983 and was still airing as the North American video game crash was beginning to unfold, lending it a retrospective irony given how rapidly the market collapsed.