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.
List of Atari 2600 games
This is a list of games for the Atari 2600 video game console, totaling more than 565 games, divided into the following sections: games published by Atari and Sears, games published by third parties during the 2600's production run, and later homebrew releases. The Atari 2600 was first released in North America on September 11, 1977 and featured nine launch titles: "Air-Sea Battle", "Basic Math", "Blackjack", "Combat", "Indy 500", "Star Ship", "Street Racer", "Surround" and "Video Olympics". The final licensed Atari 2600 games released in North America were Ikari Warriors, MotoRodeo, Sentinel, and Xenophobe in the spring of 1991 , and the final licensed games released in Europe were "Klax" and "Acid Drop" in 1990 and 1992, respectively.