Word: atari
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...customers trying to buy them. Games are the most important segment of the toy market. Manufacturers are expected to gross some $450 million in 1977, up 10% from the previous year. Last season TV action games of the Pong variety were the electronic craze, and manufacturers Fairchild and Atari are back on the market with more versatile and more expensive cassette models...
King Pong. Nolan Bushnell, 34, saw a future in video computer games. In 1976 his four-year-old company, Atari Inc., the maker of Pong and other electronic entertainments, was sold to Warner Communications Inc. for $28 million; Bushnell remains chairman of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company with a six-figure salary...
Bushnell started Atari in 1972, when he was 27; the firm was financed by Bushnell and a partner with $500. By the end of 1973 the company's sales were $11 million; they had reached $36 million...
...some 40 manufacturers are producing TV games at list prices of $40 and up. By the end of the Christmas season, Americans will have bought some 3 million of them this year-at least ten times as many as in 1975. Some of the leading makers, notably Atari, Fairchild and Magnavox, have plants working overtime and still cannot meet the demand. Nor, it seems, is there any limit to the TV games people will eventually play. By TIME's count, there are already more than 50 different varieties of video contests available, from tennis to tank warfare to ticktacktoe...
...least 18 U.S. firms and 23 European companies are fighting for a share of the more than $60 million that industry sources expect to rack up this year from selling electronic games. This hunt for profits could wind up in court. Atari, whose Pong machines were the first to show up in penny arcades, has secured a patent on the electronic circuitry that makes the games possible. Its management contends that other manufacturers should therefore be paying Atari a royalty on each game they produce. To the true pinball aficionado, of course, all this is beside the point; what...