The Rise And Fall Of Atari

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THE RISE AND FALL OF ATARI

Kiara Morgan

University of Texas at Tyler College of Engineering and Computer Science

Introduction
The year was 1972. This was the year Atari was created. When it was first released, Atari was one of the most popular gaming systems of the pop culture. Computer Space and Pong being among their first two games, got them their break. In a world where arcade games were not mass produced, Atari made them exist. Atari are not only considered the founders of arcade games but they made household gaming systems possible. Atari rose to be a great video gaming system but through the years, trials and tribulations eventually led to the downfall of this evolutionary gaming company.
The Creator
Nolan Bushnell was born on February 4, 1943 in Clearfield Utah. Nolan was participating in the engineering program at the University of Utah. He worked as in an amusement park along side his computer science studies. A big hobby of his was a game called Space War in which he and his peers had to play on a super computer at the university. Nolan Bushnell graduated from college in 1968 and moved to California where he tried to work for Disney but they turned him down so he worked for an engineering company called Ampex. He spent his day time working for Ampex and his nights were spent building his arcade video game in is daughters bed room. He used free parts he got from Ampex and some parts he got from friends at other electronics companies. Nolan used a TV as his monitor, and an old paint thinner can as the prototype coin box. The monitor was black and white. In 1971 Bushnell invented his first video game. It was called Computer Space. The game was said to be too complicated for mass production. Nolan decided to ...

... middle of paper ...

...ould even be interested in the game at all.

Figure 8
Atari’s The Extra Terrestrial game
The extra Terrestrial ended up being the worst game Atari ever made people said it was worse than Pac Man, Atari ended up trashing millions of both the games in a New Mexico Land fill.

Conclusion
In 1983 Atari had a chance to revive itself and a little of its fortune but it messed up its opportunity. Nintendo the creator of the video game Donkey Kong decided it was going to bring its Famicon to the United States and join the gaming market but it didn’t want to do it alone so they started to negotiate and talk for about three days and Nintendo decided to go in the market alone and in the end it was a good choice for Nintendo becoming one of the biggest gaming companies in the industry asfor Atari they don’t really do much anymore and that was the last big chance they had.

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