Atari is a name under which several companies have made and sold electronic games and the machines on which they are played. The original Atari, an early manufacturer of video games, is especially known for producing the first popular home video game system. The rest of this article deals with this company.
The American engineers Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari in 1972. They took the name from a Japanese term used in the traditional board game go. Atari released its first successful game, the arcade machine Pong, in 1972. An arcade machine is a coin-operated video game housed in a freestanding cabinet. Pong was a simple but fast-paced game with extremely basic two-color graphics (visual elements). Based on table tennis, the game enabled players to hit a ball back and forth between “paddles,” which they controlled using push-buttons or levers called joysticks. Pong was an immediate success, and Atari grew greatly in size.
In 1977, Atari released a video game console called the Video Computer System (VCS), later renamed the Atari 2600. Video game consoles are household computers built specifically for playing video games. Unlike some early consoles, which could play only built-in games, the VCS system played games stored on interchangeable cartridges. The VCS and later Atari consoles remained popular throughout the 1980’s.
Despite the success of Atari’s consoles, the company experienced difficulties, some of which resulted from competition between home video game systems and early personal computers. Since 1976, the Atari name has undergone many changes in ownership.
See also Arcade game; Electronic game (Arcade games) (The rise and fall of Atari).
