Atari Turns 50: A Look Back on the Original Name in Video Games
On June 27, 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney incorporated Atari in Sunnyvale, California. And it's safe to say that if this didn't happen, I'd be a different person.
I spent my childhood living and breathing Atari: playing 2600 games, crowding Atari coin-ops crammed into pizzerias and bodegas, and running an Atari 800 bulletin board system (BBS) in the mid-1980s. These early experiences inform everything I write about technology now.
As an adult, I've written Adventure(Opens in a new window), Breakout(Opens in a new window), and Faster Than Light(Opens in a new window), three books about the Atari's 2600, 800, and ST, plus Attract Mode(Opens in a new window), a book about arcade coin-ops that features Atari heavily. Many other tech enthusiasts of a certain vintage feel as strongly about Atari as I do. So in honor of the brand's 50th anniversary, it seems appropriate to celebrate and look back on the storied history of one of the most iconic names in technology.
When I grew up, two common tropes were that the first video game was Pong and that Nolan Bushnell invented it. Although Bushnell and Pong both deserve plenty of credit, the real story is more nuanced. It evolved over the course of the 20th century, as amusement parks led to penny arcades, Skee-Ball, pinball, and other electromechanical attractions that relied increasingly on skill as well as chance. Inklings of video games appeared as early as the late 1940s with the very first vacuum-tube-based, room-sized computers, as researchers experimented with chess, puzzles, and displaying moving points of light on screens.
One of the most important and influential early video games was Spacewar!, developed in 1962 at MIT primarily by Steve Russell. Spacewar! was a
Read more on pcmag.com
