History of video games market in 1978 with the Odyssey, while toy company Mattel released the Intellivision in 1979, which featured graphics superior to any of its competitors. After both Atari and Fairchild made a strong showing in 1977, the market hit a difficult patch in 1978 when retailers resisted building inventory, believing that the newly emerging electronic handheld market would displace video games. Atari, for example, manufactured 800,000 systems, but proved unable to sell more than 500,000 to retail. This helped precipitate a crisis at the company that saw co-founder and chairman Nolan Bushnell and president Joe Keenan forced out by Atari's parent
Bushnell Corporation Bushnell Corporation Bushnell Corporation is an American firm specializing in sporting optics and outdoor products. It is based in Overland Park, Kansas and is a subsidiary of Vista Outdoor. Bushnell's products include binoculars, telescopes, spotting scopes, riflescopes, red dot sights, GPS devices, laser rangefinders, game cameras, night-vision and other optical equipment. The company was founded in 1948 by David P. Bushnell, when he returned to California from his honeymoon in Japan with two crates of binoculars and sold them by mail order. Bushnell made precision binoculars affordable to middle-class Americans for the first time through a strategy of importing from