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.
Planet of the Apes
In 1983, 20th Century Fox Videogames developed a "Planet of the Apes" game for the Atari 2600, which was to be the first computer game based on the series. The game was still in the prototype phase when Fox shuttered its game division during the video game crash of 1983 and never saw release. It was assumed lost until 2002, when collectors identified a prototype, found earlier in a case labeled "Alligator People", as the missing "Apes" game. Independent designers Retrodesign completed and released the game as "Revenge of the Apes" in 2003. In the game, the player controls Taylor as he fights apes across several levels inspired by the film to reach the Statue of Liberty.