What Happened to Atari — The Name That Once Meant Video Games

In 1983, a company that had just been the fastest-growing business in America paid a landfill to bury its own products in the New Mexico desert. For thirty years people said it never happened. In 2014, a backhoe proved them wrong. This is the full rise and fall of Atari, the company that built the video game industry and then ran itself into the ground. We trace how Nolan Bushnell started it in 1972 with Pong, how the Atari 2600 put video games in thirty million homes, why four programmers walked out to found Activision after being told "anybody can do a cartridge," how the E.T. game and the 1983 video game crash ended it, and the truth about the cartridges buried in Alamogordo. Then the strangest turn: how Jack Tramiel, seven months after being pushed out of Commodore, bought Atari for fifty dollars and turned it on his old company in the Amiga lawsuit. If you ever wondered what happened to Atari, or who owns Atari now, this is the whole story. Sources: Wikipedia: Atari Inc., Atari 2600, Video game crash of 1983, Atari video game burial, Ray Kassar, Activision, Atari ST, History of the Amiga, Atari SA Computer History Museum (Atari founding and Pong) IEEE Spectrum (inventing the Atari 2600) NPR and Den of Geek (Howard Scott Warshaw and the E.T. game) New Mexico Magazine and The Henry Ford (2014 Alamogordo excavation) Smithsonian National Museum of American History (recovered E.T. cartridge) UPI Archives (1984 Warner sale to Jack Tramiel) company-histories and Hasbro Interactive (JTS, Hasbro, Infogrames) If you had an Atari 2600 under the television, tell me the first game you ever loaded into it. I read everything. #Atari #RetroGaming #VideoGameHistory