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.
Space Invaders
The 1980 Atari 2600 version was the first official licensing of an arcade game and became the first "killer app" for video game consoles by quadrupling the system's sales. It sold over two million units in its first year on sale as a home console game, making it the first title to sell a million cartridges. Other official ports were released for the Atari 8-bit computer line and Atari 5200 console, while Taito later released it for the Nintendo Famicom in 1985 (Japan only). Numerous unofficial clones were made, such as the popular computer games "Super Invader" (1979) and "TI Invaders" (1981), which was the top-selling game for the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A through at least 1982. Adjusted for inflation, all versions of "Space Invaders" are estimated to have exceeded $13 billion in gross revenue, making it the highest-grossing video game of all time.