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
Ted Dabney studied trade drafting, which led to him getting a job with the California Department of Transportation while still a teenager. He eventually got his high school diploma from San Mateo High School; Dabney credited a math teacher named Walker there that got him interested in the electronics and computing areas. He then had a summer position with a local surveyor company, but when the work dried up by the winter, he was let go, and he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. Within his three years of the Corps he took courses on electronics, giving him an interest in