Space Race (video game) first game. After leaving Nutting Associates and founding Atari in May 1972, Bushnell spent a few days designing "Asteroid", but soon had to drop the project to focus on running the company. After the release of "Pong", Atari's first game, development resumed on the title in Spring 1973. Dabney has claimed credit for the game's final design, though "Pong" designer Allan Alcorn has stated that he and Bushnell may have been involved as well. "Asteroid", codenamed VP-2, was designed to be a racing game that would be simple to create to fulfill an earlier contract with Bally Midway; Atari had
Nolan Bushnell the father of home video gaming, while Bushnell is credited with innovating the arcade game. At the British Academy Video Games Awards on March 10, 2009, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded the Academy Fellowship to Bushnell in recognition of his outstanding achievement as a founding father of the video games industry. Since 2008, there has been interest to a biographical film about Bushnell's life. While Bushnell had been approached by others to make such a film and turned these offers down, he accepted an offer made by Paramount Pictures in June 2008 with a script by