THOUGH ITS PHYSICAL PRESENCE MAY NOT BE ANYWHERE NEAR what it was during the golden era, arcade gaming has never found a stronger foothold in modern culture than it has right now. For children of the 1970s and 1980s, these games bring back a special feeling that most modern games fail to capture. They crafted an experience around the act of playing the game. Most games of the day averaged less than a minute of actual playing time per quarter, but you’d bet you had been there for much longer than a minute. Another quarter, another minute; the cycle continued.
Despite uncertainty and unrest never feeling greater than it did at that moment, a group of innovators knew that there was something greater out there than pinball and coin-op paper card games … they just didn’t know what it was. Yet through relentless trial and error, as became the manifesto at Atari, they pushed forward, risking everything they held dear to create entertainment for the masses centered on one thing: fun.
What they created formed the basis for video gaming as we know it today, cementing their position as industry pioneers while simultaneously inspiring the next generation.
For those who worked on the games, it was a challenge unlike anything experienced before or ever again. They learned as they went, but everything they did was but another stone on the pathway of gaming history. Not everything was a hit, and the company certainly wasn’t perfect, but they were creating history, and history is rarely perfect.
For players, it was an inspiring time. There was something new and innovative around every turn. One day you were playing in black and white, the next you were playing in color. One day you were at an arcade, the next you were playing on the TV in your own home.
In twelve short years, Atari redefined entertainment, built that into a multibillion-dollar industry, and drove it straight back into the ground. While the effects of this last part should not be understated, the journey along the way resulted in the creation of a new art form, one that seeks to inspire and delight with each new game, just as Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell had always intended. We were treated to everything from a simple game of virtual table tennis to the horrifying realities of nuclear war. It was a period of innovation that challenged what most believed to be possible, transforming modern life as we knew it. Without Atari, there most certainly would have been others who would find a way to commercialize Ralph Baer’s vision, but without Nolan Bushnell, it most certainly would not have been as fun.
Rich Adam went on to program the arcade release of Gravitar, a vector-based space combat game. He left Atari in 1983, continuing to work in games for more than two decades. He now leads his own technology consulting firm.
Al Alcorn left Atari in 1981 following creative differences about the direction of the company. He wanted to move beyond the Video Computer System into other areas of innovation. Ray Kassar disagreed, and Alcorn eventually stopped showing up to work entirely. They called this “the beach” at Atari: you could retain your salary and benefits until the end of your contract, but were asked not to come in or do any work. It was an unofficial severance of sorts. Following his departure, he helped consult for tech startups and eventually joined Apple, leading the team that would develop the compression technology required to interpret video as a file format, MPEG. He continues to work in research and development to this day. He regrets telling Steve Jobs that Apple stock “wasn’t worth using as wallpaper” when asked to invest.
Ralph Baer continued to create gaming consoles following Atari’s dominance over the Magnavox Odyssey, helping both Coleco and Magnavox create competing home consoles. He later sued Atari for copyright infringement over the release of Pong and was awarded $700,000. He retired shortly thereafter. Though Nolan Bushnell initially tried to portray himself as the inventor of the video game, Baer is universally considered to be the “father of video games.” He passed away on December 6, 2014, at the age of ninety-two.
After leaving Atari in 1978, Nolan Bushnell purchased back his original creation, a chain of pizza restaurants that featured arcade gaming and animatronics, which was then called Pizza Time Theatre; he eventually renamed it Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre. The company would later go bankrupt due to the video game crash of 1983, but it was revived by former rivals of Bushnell, and now has more than five hundred locations across the United States, fulfilling Bushnell’s vision of a place that kids could enjoy arcade gaming in a family environment. Bushnell also created Catalyst Technologies, a business incubator focused on creating the products of the future, with Al Alcorn. He received a percentage of Atari’s profits throughout the company’s historic run. He is now focused on improving children’s education.
Ted Dabney stayed in close touch with Nolan Bushnell after leaving Atari in 1973. He went on to help consult on Bushnell’s Catalyst Technologies and Pizza Time Theatre while also working at Fujitsu and Radeon Semiconductor. Eventually he decided he wanted to leave the high-stress Silicon Valley life, and he moved to Crescent Mills, California, where he went on to own and operate a grocery store. Ted passed away on May 26, 2018 at age 81 from esophageal cancer.
Ray Kassar was cleared of all insider trading allegations against him and retired, becoming a private collector and investor. Though his work at Atari eventually ended in disaster, he saved the company’s Video Computer System from discontinuation, popularized the home console, and grew Atari into a multibillion-dollar corporation. He passed away on December 10, 2017 in Vero Beach, Florida, at the age of eighty-nine.
Dave Theurer remained at Atari following the completion of Tempest, creating I, Robot (a commercial flop, now widely regarded as the first commercially produced video game to feature 3-D polygonal graphics and camera-control options) and APB. He left in 1990 to create an early game art tool, DeBabelizer, and now works as a programmer at a software management company. He was awarded the Pioneer Award at the 2012 Game Developers Conference for his work at Atari.
Walt Williams left 2K Games following the release of Spec Ops: The Line, eventually cowriting Star Wars: Battlefront 2 at EA Motive, which was released in 2017.
Atari was sold to French software publisher Infogrames in 2000, and continued to grow as Infogrames purchased more of the company’s stock over the course of the next decade. Though it appeared dead after declaring bankruptcy in 2013, the company has since reemerged as Atari, SA, with a focus on “new audiences.”