Atari Inc is a company which millennials probably have forgotten. The best way to introduce Atari Inc is; it is the company in which Steve Jobs worked before he started Apple Inc with Steve Wazniac in a garage in Palo Alto.
Atari Inc is the company which marked the birth of Arcade Video game. Atari was founded in 1972 when Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney join hands to started their own firm. The company started making headway when their first hired engineer Al Alcorn made their first product, the historical arcade game : Pong. The game worked on a coin mechanism like in vending machines. The game was first placed in tavern in Sunnyvale where it gained so much popularity that people started lining up to play the game. Then it started being shipped to bars and big departmental stores. In order to break the exclusive deals with distributors Atari secretly created its own competitor called Kee Games. Atari and Kee Games together created several ground breaking games during this time.
Within the next years Atari created consoles which would support multiple games all in one. Pong’s popularity forced Atari to create a family version of Pong which could be played at home. Atari’s subsidiary ‘competitor’ Kee games created the Tank Games which became the basis of Atari’s famous game ‘Combat’. Pong’s modified version got released and was a flop and marked a big loss for them.It was at this time that Steve Jobs was working for Atari and he helped improve a game called ‘Pong — turned on its side’.
In 1976 Bushnell sold Atari to Warner communications. In the years following there were many releases from Atari, some of them were hits and some flops. Some of the remarkable ones were Atari 2600, Combat, Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari Battlezone etc. One of Atari’s great success after Pong was Atari 2600.
The early 1980’s turned out to be bad for Atari. The company’s different divisions did not coordinate and gained them a bad market reputation. Atari’s releases at this point were failures; like Pacman and ET failed.This bad phase for Atari was followed by the ‘greatest video game crash’ of 1983. The total losses at this point summed up to be approximately 500 million dollars.
The famous Japanese company Ninetendo started making games and wanted to license Atari’s console. The deal fell apart and the CEO was made to leave. Atari could never come out of this and the company finally shut its doors in 1984.
