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)
In 1977, Atari produced "Star Ship" for the Atari 2600, which contained several space-related games; one of these was titled "Lunar Lander", though despite the name its gameplay involved landing on a surface while avoiding enemy spaceships instead of the gameplay of the arcade game. While Atari did not produce any true sequels or contemporary ports of the game, in 1981 Adventure International produced a version of the concept under the title "Lunar Lander" as part of a series of arcade game clones for the TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit computers, which, though featuring differences from the Atari version, was advertised as "an arcade game simulation". At least one other arcade game based on the "Lunar Lander" concept was developed around the same time, the non-vector graphics game "Lunar Rescue" by Taito. The Atari "Lunar Lander" has been included in several Atari compilation releases for various platforms starting in 2003, such as "Atari: 80 Classic Games in One" (2003, personal computer), the Atari Flashback 2 console (2005), "Millipede / Super Breakout / Lunar Lander" (2005, Game Boy Advance), "Retro Atari Classics" (2005, Nintendo DS), "Atari Masterpieces" (2005, N-Gage), "Atari Classics Evolved" (2007, PlayStation Portable), "Atari Greatest Hits" (2010, Nintendo DS, Android, iOS), and "Atari Flashback Classics Volume 1" (2017, PlayStation 4, Xbox One).