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 determine interest and optimal per-game pricing. Only prototype units were ever built, though the second prototype was adapted to run up to eight games at once; a few months before the initial installation at Stanford in November 1971, the pair met with Nolan Bushnell, who informed them of his own game he was making for a much lower price. That game was "Computer Space", developed by Bushnell and Ted Dabney. They had found the Data General Nova, a US$4,000 computer that they thought would be powerful enough to run four games of "Spacewar" at once; the computer turned out to