The Atari brand is celebrating 50 years today. The company was originally founded on June 27, 1972, by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. The name Atari is a term taken from the Japanese board game Go. In Go, atari means a player is about to take their opponent’s piece.
This history of Atari is foundational to the history of video games as a whole, and the story of Atari includes many keystone moments that even non-gamers are likely to be familiar with.
After releasing the world’s first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space in 1971, Bushnell and Dabney founded Atari. They hired Al Alcorn, who went on to create Pong, the first commercially successful video game. When Pong‘s popularity led to dozens of Pong clones flooded the market, Bushnell and Dabney decided they wanted a home Pong machine that would allow players to switch out different games. Thus, the Atari VCS, later renamed as the Atari 2600, was born.
The massive success of the Atari 2600 inspired yet more knockoffs and clones. Couple this with the oversaturation of games into the market (and little quality control being applied to those games), not to mention a few questionable decisions made internally by Atari, and the video game industry crashed in 1983.
Since that time, the company has changed hands several times, and although Atari never really recovered from the crash, it’s still a massively nostalgic brand, especially for kids of the ’70s and ’80s. None of the company’s owners have ever really known how to properly leverage that nostalgia, especially the current owners, Atari SA, who seem to favor hotels and NFTs over video games.
Whether or not the Atari brand ever returns to its former glory, we’ll still have the memories of games like Pitfall, Yars’ Revenge, Adventure, and many others.
