Atari, Inc. Atari, Inc. Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. Primarily responsible for the formation of the video arcade and modern video game industries, the company was closed and its assets split in 1984 as a direct result of the North American video game crash of 1983. In 1966, Nolan Bushnell saw "Spacewar!" for the first time at the University of Utah. By 1968, Bushnell had become an employee of Ampex in San Francisco, and worked alongside Ted Dabney. The two found they had shared interests, including
Nolan Bushnell Pizza Place, a competing Pizza/Arcade family restaurant, then purchased Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre and assumed its debt. The newly formed company, ShowBiz Pizza Time, operated restaurants under both brands before unifying all locations under the Chuck E. Cheese's brand by 1992. Today over 500 locations of this restaurant are in business. Bushnell founded Catalyst Technologies, one of the earliest business incubators. The Catalyst Group companies numbered in the double digits and included Androbot, Etak, Cumma, and Axlon. Axlon launched many consumer and consumer electronic products successfully, most notably AG Bear, a bear that mumbled/echoed a child's words back