In the beginning it went “pong”. In 1972, a newly founded start-up launched a video game of that name, which was primarily played on coin-operated machines. The simple tennis simulation, for which a home console was also specially developed, was Atari’s first major success. Numerous other games were to follow, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition, the company made a name for itself with groundbreaking computers, which some owners still cherish and care for today.Atari: Epitome of video games
Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded Atari on June 27, 1972. The two borrowed the name of their company from Japanese, the exclamation means “hit the mark” and is often used in the traditional board game Go. After the appearance of “Pong”, Atari quickly became the epitome of video games, slot machines with games from the US company were an integral part of arcades and shopping malls in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the same time, the company made a name for itself as a manufacturer of consoles such as the Atari 2600, Atari 5200 and Atari 7800 and later also of home computers such as the Atari 400 and 800. Incidentally, in 1975 Atari had two computer pioneers who are now world-famous among its employees: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The later Apple founders were responsible for the further development of the Pong console and the video game classic “Breakout”.
1985: The Atari ST appears
With the emergence and increasing spread of home computers such as the Commodore VC20 and 64 or Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with which you could play excellently, but also devices from Apple, Atari’s hardware division got into financial difficulties and was finally taken over in 1984 by Jack Tramiel, who had just been at Commodore had retired. Under his leadership, a device was created in just five months that set standards in 1985: the Atari ST. Like the Apple Macintosh that appeared about a year earlier, the computer was based on Motorola 68000 series processors and had a graphical user interface developed by Digital Research called GEM.
Brand name changes hands several times
In the early 1990s, Atari began to decline as a result of increasing competition, in particular the triumph of IBM-compatible PCs. After an unsuccessful attempt to launch a new games console, the company was taken over by hard drive manufacturer JT Storage. Over the years, the brand name changed hands again and again. In 1998, the rights to the Atari name went to Hasbro, whose acquisition by the French game publisher Infogrames then caused another change of ownership. Since 2009, Infogrames has officially operated under the Atari SA name and is also offering hardware again to a small extent, such as the Atari VCS console, which is currently unavailable.