Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27th, 1972. Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since 1972. Atari develops, publishes and distributes games for all major video game consoles, as well as for the personal computer, and is currently one of the largest third-party publishers of video games in the United States.
Bushnell, Atri's founder, wrote down several words from the game Go, eventually choosing atari, a term that in the context of the game means a state where a stone or group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent. In Japanese, atari is the nominalized form of ataru, which literally means to "target" or "aim at" something.
Atari purchased an engineering think-tank in 1973 called Cyan Engineering to research next-generation video game systems, and had been working on a prototype known as "Stella" (named after one of the engineers' bicycles) for some time. Atari suffered from an image problem when a company named Mystique produced a number of pornographic games for the 2600. Atari sued Mystique in court over the release of the game.
The company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, helped define the computer entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid 1980s. Since the early days of coin operated machines, Atari has been responsible for home consoles such as the Atari 2600 (VCS); produced a series of eight-bit computers (Atari 400, 800, XL and XE series); taken part in the 16 bit computer revolution with the Atari ST; made the revolutionary (for its time) 64-bit Atari Jaguar; and released a hand held video game console, the Atari Lynx.
After talks to release Pong through Nutting and several other companies broke down, Bushnell and his partner Ted Dabney decided to release Pong on their own,[10] and Atari Inc. In 1973, Atari secretly spawned a "competitor" called Kee Games, headed by Nolan's next door neighbor Joe Keenan, to circumvent pinball distributors' insistence on exclusive distribution deals; both Atari and Kee could market (virtually) the same game to different distributors, with each getting an "exclusive" deal. Though Kee's relationship to Atari was discovered in 1974, Joe Keenan did such a good job managing the subsidiary that he was promoted to president of Atari that same year. In 1975 Bushnell started an effort to produce a flexible video game console that was capable of playing all four of Atari's then-current games. The result was the Atari 2600, one of the most successful consoles in history. By the middle of the effort's time-frame the home computer revolution was taking off, so the new machines were adapted with the addition of a keyboard and various inputs to produce the Atari 800, and its smaller cousin, the 400.
In 1976, Nolan Bushnell, Atari's original owner/creator sold the company to Warner Communications for $28 million.
Atari was now run by Raymond Kassar who wanted Atari to compete in the home computer market against Apple and its Apple ][e computer. Atari's new Home Computer Division was so hastily started that office trailers were brought in and set-up behind Atari's offices while work progressed on the new computer designs. Atari also introduced an all new line of computers called the Atari ST line. Atari would, over the course of 8 years improve upon its ST line of computers with such lines as the Mega ST, STe, Mega STe, TT030 and Falcon030 line of computers. Atari also introduced a laptop called the STacy and had in the works an under 5 lb. Atari also introduced other PC compatible systems as well as a 386sx laptop and also an IBM XT palmtop computer the size of a VHS video tape.
While part of Warner, Atari achieved its greatest success, selling millions of 2600s and computers. At its peak, Atari accounted for a third of Warner's annual income and was the fastest-growing company in the history of the United States at the time. Still, the 2600 remained the industry standard-bearer, because of its market superiority, and because of Atari featuring (by far) the greatest variety of game titles available. However, Atari ran into problems in the early 1980s. Faced with fierce competition and price wars in the game console and home computer markets, Atari was never able to duplicate the success of the 2600. In 1982, Atari released disappointing versions of two highly publicized games, Pac-Man and E. (In 1983, in response to a massive number of returned orders from distributors, Atari buried millions of unsold game cartridges (the bulk of them consisting of those same two titles, Pac-Man and E. The Atari 5200 game console, released as a next-generation follow up to the 2600, was based on the Atari 800 computer (but was incompatible with Atari 800 game cartridges), and its sales never met the company's expectations. Still, Atari held a formidable position in the world video game market, and was the number one console maker in every market except Japan. Looking to also sell the console in international markets, a partnership with Atari seemed a good match and Nintendo approached Atari to offer a licensing deal whereby Atari would build and sell the system, paying Nintendo a royalty. With Atari's further financial problems and the Famicom's runaway Japanese success after its July 16th, 1983 release date, Nintendo decided to go at it alone. In July 1984, Warner sold the home computing and game console divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel, the recently ousted founder of Atari competitor Commodore International, under the name Atari Corporation for $240 million in stocks under the new company. Warner retained the arcade division, continuing it under the name Atari Games and eventually selling it to Namco in 1985. In 1989, Atari also released the Atari Lynx, a handheld console with color graphics, to critical acclaim. As the fortunes of Atari's ST and PC compatible computers faded, consoles and software again became the company's main focus. By 1996, a series of successful lawsuits followed by profitable investments had left Atari with millions of dollars in the bank, but the failure of the Lynx and Jaguar left Atari without any products to sell. In March 1998, JTS sold the Atari name and assets to Hasbro Interactive for $5 million—less than a fifth of what Warner Communications had paid 22 years earlier. This transaction primarily involved the brand and intellectual property, which now fell under the Atari Interactive division of Hasbro Interactive. In the meantime, Atari Games was bought out by its employees in 1986, who also founded Tengen to bring their arcade games in to the home. Over 1999-2000, Midway held closed door proceedings with Hasbro which ultimately led to Atari Games being renamed Midway Games West. In October 2001, Infogrames announced that it was "reinventing" the Atari brand with the launch of three new games. On May 7, 2003, Infogrames officially reorganized its US subsidiary as a separate entity known as Atari, Inc. The original Atari holdings division purchased from Hasbro, Atari Interactive, was also spun off as a separate corporate entity. In 2002, Jakks Pacific, a toy making company, released a plug-and-play video game console called the Atari 10-in-1 TV Game. It was battery-operated and shaped similarly to an Atari 2600 joystick, and included A/V ports. In 2004, the same company created a device called Atari Paddle Games, in the shape of one of the 2600s "paddle" controllers with appropriate titles included. The same year that the Paddle Games were released, Atari released a TV game of their own which they called the Atari Flashback Console. The device was designed and produced by Atari consultant Curt Vendel through his engineering firm Legacy Engineering. With only a 10 week development window, what they produced looked like a minute version of the Atari 7800 console originally released in 1984, 20 years previously. Because of popular demand, Atari hired Curt Vendel once again to produce a follow up product. With a longer development window, Vendel released a new version of the Flashback console, titled Atari Flashback 2, in August 2005. The Flashback 2 is based on an implementation of the original Atari 2600 on a single chip that Curt Vendel designed, allowing the original 2600 games to be run instead of ports as in the first Flashback. Also, in late October 2005, Atari released one of two collections of its classic arcade games only for the Nokia N-Gage console, titled Atari Masterpieces. On May 5, 2006, Atari and Hasbro stopped Bioware and DLA from further development of premium modules and publishing near-completed premium modules for Neverwinter Nights. On October 2, 2006 Atari announced that it had sold off Shiny Entertainment to Foundation 9 Entertainment, which culminated in the completion of their strategic divesture. Recently, Atari's top-selling titles have been the Dragon Ball Z games based on the popular anime license from Toei Animation in Japan. These games have topped the best-seller charts for numerous console platforms since the release of Atari's first Dragon Ball Z game, The Legacy of Goku in 2002, which was the first Dragon Ball game to be made by an American company, Webfoot Technologies, and is one of the best-selling Game Boy Advance games of all time (#16). Other currently popular titles for Atari include RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Test Drive Unlimited, Neverwinter Nights, Godzilla games, the Alone in the Dark series and the Driver series (recently sold to Ubisoft for a reported $24 million[15]). (June 2007)The founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, was also the founder of the well known restaurant franchise Chuck E. The Ataris, a band, is named after the company. In the movie Terminator 2: Judgement Day, young John Connor uses an Atari Portfolio (predecessor of the palmtop computer) to steal money from an ATM. [1] The company also built a sleeker version of the machine dubbed the Atari 2800 to sell directly to the Japanese market in early 1983, but it suffered from competition with the newly released Nintendo Famicom. The programmers of many of Atari's biggest hits grew disgruntled with the company for not crediting game developers. For example, Rick Mauer, the programmer of Atari 2600 Space Invaders, received no credit and made only $11,000 for his efforts, in spite of the cartridge grossing more than $100 million in sales. Most notably, Warren Robinett, the lead programmer of Adventure, in protest against Atari's anonymity policy, hid his name in a secret room within the game. The most prominent and longest-lasting of these third-party developers was Activision, founded in 1980, whose titles quickly became more popular than those of Atari itself.
It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, who has licensed the brand name and assets to Atari, Inc.
Although the original Atari ceased to exist, a large amount of underground support and development remains for Atari's game systems and computers of the 1970s and 1980s, and many of the retro-gaming conventions (such as World Of Atari, Philly Classic, and the Midwest Gaming Classic), focus largely on Atari. There are also websites dedicated to the release of new products for the original Atari consoles and computers, such as AtariAge. However, it was the Atari 2600 that made the plug-in concept popular among the game-playing public.
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