âIt's a tempting offer, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a rain check on that one.â âThanks to all of you who wrote to me with invites for free dinners and guest rooms, but it looks like I'll have to take a collective rain check.â âI've got a lot of studying to do, I'll have to take a rain check.â
The original Atari, Inc. founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles, and home computers. The company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
In 1979, Activision was created by disgruntled former Atari programmers who realized that the games they had anonymously programmed on their $20K salaries were responsible for 60 percent of the company's $100 million in cartridge sales for one year. It was the first third-party developer of video games. Computer role-playing video games: Akalabeth (1980) was created in the same year as Rogue (1980); Akalabeth led to the creation of its spiritual sequel Ultima (1981). 2  Its sequels were the inspiration for some of the first Japanese role-playing video games, alongside Wizardry (1981).