It’s been 50 years since Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabny formed Atari and ushered in the beginning of the game industry’s commercial era. But thanks to an almost neverending series of buyouts and acquisitions, the Atari that still exists today is not the same company that ruled the arcade in the 1970s and the living room in the 1980s.
And in the beginning, even Atari wasn’t known as Atari.
Atari released more than 100 games for the Atari 2600 between 1977 and 1990, but the publisher also produced dozens of prototypes that never made their way onto store shelves. Aquaventure is one such game… though it did eventually manage to escape from the briny deep.
Why?
Why do some game franchises get forgotten by their publishers? Why would a clump of dirt be important enough to be donated to a museum? And why do some publishers decide to play it safe when deciding on a game’s cover?
All of these questions will be pondered in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.
When you look back at video games in the 1970s, there’s really only one name… Atari.
From Pong to Breakout to Asteroids, Atari filled the smoke-filled arcades with a parade of classic cabinets, and charged into the next decade on top of the world. We all know they didn’t stay there, but this edition of Bite-Sized Game History looks back at what the company was doing just before it all came crashing down.
