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
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