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
Nolan Bushnell California, contracted with Bally Manufacturing to create a driving game, and hired their second employee, engineer Allan Alcorn. Bushnell later bought out Dabney, who was forced out after Nolan told him he would transfer all the assets to another corporation and leave Ted with nothing. After Bushnell attended a Burlingame, California demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, he gave the task of making the Magnavox tennis game into a coin-op version to Alcorn as a test project. He told Alcorn that he was making the game for General Electric, in order to motivate him, but in actuality he planned to simply