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.
Lunar Lander (1979 video game)
Development of the game began with the creation of a vector graphics engine by Atari after the release of the 1978 Cinematronics game "Space Wars". Upon its completion, engine co-designer Howard Delman proposed using it to create a Lunar Lander game, a genre which had seen numerous text-based examples beginning in 1969 and the graphical game "Moonlander" (1973). Delman and Rich Moore then developed the game itself. It was Atari's first vector-based game and the first multiple-perspective video game, changing views as the module approaches the Moon. "Lunar Lander" sold 4,830 units, a moderate success, but it was soon overtaken by the November 1979 "Asteroids", and 300 "Asteroids" units were shipped in "Lunar Landing"-branded cabinets. "Lunar Lander" was one of the first two games to be registered with the United States Copyright Office, though the prior games in the genre kept the gameplay from being patented. It was one of the first games ported by Atari to its Atari Arcade browser game portal and has been featured in an art installation at the Dublin Science Gallery.