Atari, a Timeless Legend

Atari is an integral part of my heart: my very first console ever, bought for me by my parents under the supervision of my older brother, was the Atari 7800 itself: an exceptional machine, with the Asteroids cartridge included, which for my part remains one of the best arcade titles of that generation and beyond. But to truly understand the scale of Bushnell’s impact and his company, we have to do exactly what the mustached plumber of the Japanese competition does, namely make a leap much farther back into the past and land in 1972, the year Atari was founded and a significant date, because it marked the beginning of everything.

Lo did so under the sign of Pong. From that moment on, the world was never the same again. We’re talking about the iconic TV version of ping pong, in plain terms, strictly in black and white and which allowed two players to challenge each other by hitting a ball with paddles, white bars that could move vertically along a predefined axis to avoid letting the ball end up at the far edge of the screen, meaning a point for the opponent! A minimalist gameplay like its graphics, but one that worked from the very first day, and even the Pong arcade cabinets, legendary coin-eating machines that delivered fun at any hour, were a success in those mythological places, now gone alas, called Arcades.

Ma Pong, which also had its domestic version three years later, filling American homes’ living rooms with ruckus and inhuman screams from fiercely competitive teenagers, was only the beginning of the Myth that still hovers today around Bushnell and Atari: of course, it was not all smooth sailing, and the plagiarism lawsuit that put Atari’s Pong on trial alongside Magnavox Odissey, producer of a practically identical game released a few months earlier. It ended with plea bargains, lots of money coughed up, and the definitive consecration in history of Bushnell’s Pong, the one we still play today thanks to faithful reproductions in video game museums and industry trade shows.

But the story of Atari cannot and must not be connected exclusively to television ping pong: ranging from consoles incredibly ahead of their time for the eras in which they were produced, and magnificent games that proudly rose as benchmarks for those that would come after, Atari transformed the video game industry, ennobling it if you like, because from simple entertainment for its own sake (nothing more than a passing hobby when there were no comics to read or television programs to passively endure) the video game became much more: an indomitable passion for boys and girls, as well as a major business for entrepreneurs and industries.

Prima we mentioned the Atari 7800, released in 1984 and destined for an unequal battle against Nintendo’s NES in the years to come, but we cannot fail to mention the small great revolution brought to the industry by its adoptive father, that Atari 2600 which in recent years has been the protagonist of countless nostalgia operations, a tangible sign of its eternal value, the ideal crossroads between the “old” consoles and the legion of eight-, sixteen- and thirty-two-bit systems that would be hugely popular in the following decades: the year was 1977, the Prehistory of Video Games, in practice, but I am sure that if I say Breakout, Pitfall or Space Invaders you will not be left clueless. Right?

Atari, in the twenty-first century, still exists, although in different forms and without a reference console: in a world dominated by the triumvirate of Xbox, Nintendo and Sony, it might not find a place, who knows, but its legacy is more alive than ever and we hold it very close.