Rebound (video game)
Development of "Rebound" began in late 1973, as one of several variations they produced in 1974 on the gameplay of the successful "Pong" (1972), Atari's first game and the fourth-ever arcade game. Around the same time, Atari launched Kee Games, a subsidiary meant to produce clone games of Atari's products and act as a competitor in order to expand into more distribution channels in the same region than the industry typically supported. Kee's first game, released in March 1974, was "Spike", a clone of "Rebound", which added a "spike" button to the game that made the paddle jump up and attempt to bounce the ball downwards instead of up. In addition to the base game, Atari sold a conversion kit to convert any Atari two-player "Pong" variant into "Rebound", and in 1977 "Rebound" was included in "Video Olympics" for the Atari 2600, a collection of "Pong" variants.
Atari 2600
Despite Bushnell's retirement in 1978, Warren Robinett's invention of the first action-adventure game, "Adventure", was developed the same year and changed the fundamentals of gaming as it unlocked a game with a "virtual space bigger than the screen". However, the VCS still had gained a killer application to sell the console, and it had suffered the loss of programmers David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Larry Kaplan, and Alan Miller, the company's "Fantastic Four", who had programmed most of the successful VCS games to that point. The four left Atari disgruntled over Warner's oversight of the company and treatment of programmers in 1978, and formed the firm Activision, which would give rise to third-party software for the VCS. While the VCS was the best-selling console during the 1979 holiday season with over 1 million units sold, Atari saw newfound competition from the Mattel Intellivision and Magnavox Odyssey², both systems that also used swapable ROM cartridges.
Atari then licensed the arcade hit "Space Invaders" by Taito, which greatly increased the unit's popularity when it was released in January 1980, doubling sales to over 2 million units. The VCS and its cartridges were the main factor behind Atari grossing more than $2 billion in 1980. Sales then doubled again for the next two years; by 1982, the console had sold 10 million units, while its best-selling game "Pac-Man" sold 7 million copies. The console also sold 450,000 units in West Germany by 1984.