Atari, Inc. he was being put to the side by Bushnell; Bushnell had left him out of several high-level meetings, assigned him to overseeing the manufacturing process but not the design work, and Dabney discovered Bushnell had patented his video circuit concept without him as an inventor. In March 1973, Dabney formally left Atari, selling his portion of the company for . While Dabney would continue to work for Bushnell on other ventures, including Bushnell's Pizza Time Theater, the predecessor to Chuck E. Cheese's, he had a falling out with Bushnell and ultimately left the video game industry. Dabney's contributions towards Atari's
Early history of video games directly displayed via modification of a video signal; it was also the first video gaming device to be displayed in a television commercial. It sold for US$100 and shipped with several games, including "Table tennis", which Bushnell had seen a demo of and which "Pong" had been based on. The Odyssey sold over 100,000 units in 1972, and more than 350,000 by the end of 1975, buoyed by the popularity of the table tennis game, in turn driven by the success of "Pong". "Pong" and the Odyssey kicked off a new era of video gaming, with numerous other competitors starting