Atari 2600 of 2004. Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney of which their first major product was "Pong" in 1972, one of the first successful arcade games. It transitioned "Pong" into a home console version by 1975, helping to pit Atari against Magnavox, the only other major competitor for home consoles at the time. Bushnell recognized that this approach to home consoles has a drawback in that because it used custom logic burned onto the circuit board, it was limited to only one game and any variants, and would require consumers to buy another console to play a different
Nolan Bushnell Pizza Place, a competing Pizza/Arcade family restaurant, then purchased Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre and assumed its debt. The newly formed company, ShowBiz Pizza Time, operated restaurants under both brands before unifying all locations under the Chuck E. Cheese's brand by 1992. Today over 500 locations of this restaurant are in business. Bushnell founded Catalyst Technologies, one of the earliest business incubators. The Catalyst Group companies numbered in the double digits and included Androbot, Etak, Cumma, and Axlon. Axlon launched many consumer and consumer electronic products successfully, most notably AG Bear, a bear that mumbled/echoed a child's words back