Atari

Atari was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Its name comes from a term in the Japanese board game Go, used when a stone is about to be captured. Atari was a pioneer of arcade games, home video game consoles and home computers.

Among Atari’s greatest achievements were Pong and the Atari 2600, which helped define the video game industry in the 1970s and 1980s.

Atari suffered heavy losses in the video game crash of 1983, and in 1984 its owner, Warner Communications, split the company. The arcade division became Atari Games, and the consumer electronics division was sold to Jack Tramiel’s Tramel Technology, which renamed itself Atari Corporation.

In 1996 Atari Corporation reverse-merged with the hard drive manufacturer JTS, becoming a division within that company.

In 1998 Hasbro bought Atari’s assets from JTS and created a new subsidiary, Atari Interactive. Infogrames bought Hasbro Interactive in 2001 and later took the Atari name, which its successor, Atari SA, still uses today.