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.
Gotcha (video game)
Development on "Gotcha" began in July 1973, as Atari's fourth game after "Pong", "Space Race", and "Pong Doubles". The company was interested in producing a very different game from their previous success of "Pong", as they felt that innovative design was what would separate them from their competitors, which they saw as flooding the market with "Pong" clones rather than making new video games. After the release of "Space Race", development immediately moved on to "Gotcha". The design of the game was done by Allan Alcorn, the designer of "Pong" and developer for "Space Race". Alcorn had the idea for the game from a defect he sometimes saw when testing "Pong" machines: if part of the circuit that converted scores to images on the screens was broken, then parts of the numbers would be scattered across the screen. Alcorn thought that combining that defect intentionally with a motion circuit could create dynamically changing mazes. A prototype design was developed by Steve Mayer of Cyan Engineering, which had recently become a semi-independent research and development subsidiary of Atari.
The cabinet for the game was designed by Atari's product designer, George Faraco. His designed featured a joystick for each player, which was encased in a pink dome that the player would rest their hands on to control the joysticks, meant to resemble breasts. Faraco later acknowledged that "they didn't have bumps on them or anything, but the way they were the size of grapefruits next to each other, you got the impression of what they were supposed to be." Atari's second engineer, Don Lange, who assisted with the game, has also stated that the design was intentional on the part of Faraco, who fellow Atari designer Regan Chang has claimed "had some really far out ideas". According to rumor, Faraco got the idea from a joke that joysticks resembled phalluses, and that Atari should make a game with female controls. Like Faraco's initial design for "Space Race", which was changed due to its expense after a few dozen units, the joysticks for "Gotcha" were changed to standard ones shortly into the production run prior to the October 11, 1973 release. The design did inspire the advertising flyer for the game, however, which features a man chasing a woman in a nightdress with the initial design of the cabinet behind them. The final cabinet stands over 5 feet tall and weighs nearly 200 pounds. The breast-like controllers reappeared in yellow in prototype versions of the 1974 "Touch Me" arcade game, but were not used in production.