Atari 2600 set of games. Further, while they could continue to take games they had created for arcade machines to home consoles, this development step cost at least and time to complete, and once on the market, had only about a three-month shelf life before being outdated, making this a risky move. In 1974, Atari had acquired Cyan Engineering, an electronics company founded by Steve Mayer and Larry Emmons, both former colleagues of Bushnell and Dabney from Ampex, and started Atari's Grass Valley Think Tank, where they were involved with coming up with new ideas for arcade games. Based on Bushnell's concern
Early history of video games determine interest and optimal per-game pricing. Only prototype units were ever built, though the second prototype was adapted to run up to eight games at once; a few months before the initial installation at Stanford in November 1971, the pair met with Nolan Bushnell, who informed them of his own game he was making for a much lower price. That game was "Computer Space", developed by Bushnell and Ted Dabney. They had found the Data General Nova, a US$4,000 computer that they thought would be powerful enough to run four games of "Spacewar" at once; the computer turned out to