History of video games industry. However, the system did directly influence the birth of a vibrant video arcade game industry after Ralph Baer's design ingenuity intersected Nolan Bushnell's entrepreneurial ambition. In 1972, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney decided to strike out on their own and incorporated their preexisting partnership as Atari. After seeing a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey ahead of its release, Bushnell charged new hire Allan Alcorn to create a version of that system's table tennis game as a practice project to familiarize himself with video game design. Alcorn's version ended up being so fun that Atari decided to release it as
David P. Bushnell a vice-president of B&L. The company was renamed to Bushnell Performance Optics by B&L. In 2005, Bushnell died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma at his home in Laguna Beach, California, a week before his 92nd birthday. Bushnell's first wife, Frances Elizabeth Krug, died in 1947. His second marriage, to Nina Gmirkin ended in divorce. Bushnell was survived by his third wife, Nancy. He had two sons, David Alan Bushnell and Steven Ensign Bushnell, and two daughters, Natasha Bushnell Suter and Jean Bushnell Salfen. David P. Bushnell David Pearsall Bushnell (1913 - 2005) was an American entrepreneur who founded the Bushnell optics company