Atari incorporates and starts building its own cabinets

What happened

The partnership had traded as Syzygy, an astronomical term, until the pair learned that a candle maker already held the name. Bushnell, a keen Go player, offered Atari instead, a word used when a group of stones stands one move from capture, close in spirit to check in chess. Incorporation went through in California that summer. The plan was deliberately unlike the Computer Space arrangement: design, manufacture, marketing and distribution would all sit inside one company, so the profit from a hit would not go to somebody else.

Growth came fast and informally. Engineers arrived from local electronics firms into a workplace with few rules and long hours, and the company solved a distribution problem by quietly setting up a supposed competitor, Kee Games, so it could sell to distributors who demanded exclusive rights. Within five years it was running an arcade division, a consumer products division and a research laboratory, and had been bought by a New York media group. For most Americans in the 1970s, the company's name and the medium itself were the same thing.

The world at the time

The Santa Clara Valley in 1972 was a landscape of semiconductor plants and defense contracts, with venture capital scarce and consumer electronics regarded as a low-margin business. The amusement trade was headquartered thousands of miles away in Chicago and controlled by distributors with long-standing loyalties. A small California firm proposing to sell them television games was an outsider in both worlds.

What it changed

Pong arrived from the new company's second engineer within months. A conglomerate bought the business in 1976, funded the cartridge console that carried games into homes, and absorbed the losses when the American market broke in 1983. Alumni founded rival publishers, chip companies and a pizza chain built around animated robots, spreading the company's habits across American entertainment.