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)
"Lunar Lander" proved moderately commercially successful, selling 4,830 cabinets. "Cash Box" noted in September 1979 that the machines were very popular with customers. It was Atari's first vector graphics game and the first multiple-perspective video game with the inclusion of the up-close view of the lander. Atari developed a two-player version of the game, but only two prototypes were ever made as it did not enter production. The two-player version was cancelled as "Lunar Lander"s popularity was soon overtaken by Atari's "Asteroids" (November 1979), which used the same vector graphics engine and which had initially been based on "Lunar Lander"s code. Atari ceased production early on "Lunar Lander" in favor of shipping "Asteroids" games in "Lunar Lander" cabinets; the first 300 "Asteroids" games were released with "Lunar Lander" artwork on the side. The Atari "Lunar Lander" was the most popular version to date of the "Lunar Lander" concept, surpassing the prior "Moonlander" and text-based games, and most later versions of the concept are implicitly or explicitly based on the Atari version.