Atari
In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a small engineering company, Syzygy Engineering, that designed and built "Computer Space", the world's first commercially available arcade video game, for Nutting Associates. On June 27, 1972, the two incorporated Atari, Inc. and soon hired Al Alcorn as their first design engineer. Bushnell asked Alcorn to produce an arcade version of the Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis game, which would be named Pong. While Bushnell incorporated Atari in June 1972, Syzygy Company was never formally incorporated. Before Atari's incorporation, Bushnell considered various terms from the game Go, eventually choosing "atari", referencing a position in the game when a group of stones is imminently in danger of being taken by one's opponent. Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972.
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, each getting an "exclusive" deal. Joe Keenan's management of the subsidiary led to him being promoted president of Atari that same year.
Sports game
In 1975, Universal Research Laboratories (URL) released an early four-player multiple-sports game, "Video Action", which featured several different sporting minigames, including "Pong"-style variants of tennis, hockey, and association football, as well as an early volleyball game and a unique four-court tennis game. "Video Action" was also an early example of cooperative gameplay, as each sport could be played in teams of two. That same year, Nintendo released "EVR-Race", an early horse racing simulation game with support for up to six players. In 1976, Sega released an early combat sport game, "Heavyweight Champ", based on boxing and now considered the first fighting game. In 1978 Atari released "Atari Football", which is considered to be the first video game to accurately emulate American football; it also popularized the use of the trackball, having been inspired by an earlier Taito soccer game that used a trackball. Taito also released an early bowling game in 1978, "Top Bowler", followed by an early baseball game in 1979, "Ball Park".