It’s been 50 years since Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabny formed Atari and ushered in the beginning of the game industry’s commercial era. But thanks to an almost neverending series of buyouts and acquisitions, the Atari that still exists today is not the same company that ruled the arcade in the 1970s and the living room in the 1980s.
And in the beginning, even Atari wasn’t known as Atari.
Zoom in on specific portions of the Video Game Canon and explore alternate sorting options from the Version 5.0 Update with Listology 5.0.
This Listology article is based on an earlier Version of the Video Game Canon. Visit the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the full list.
In 1971, Bushnell and Dabney founded Syzygy Engineering to produce arcade games for Nutting Associates. Their first project was Computer Space, a space shooter that was heavily inspired by Spacewar!, a mainframe game originally developed by a student group at MIT. Computer Space was moderately successful, but it proved to be extremely difficult for players that had grown up with pinball tables and electro-mechanical games.
Bushnell and Dabney decided to scale back their ambitions for Syzygy’s second project, ultimately hiring Al Alcorn to create Pong in 1972. But the pair found that the Syzygy name was already in use by another company… and so Atari was born.
During the next decade, Atari produced a wide range of classic arcade cabinets and moved into the console space with the launch of the Atari Video Computer System (also known as the Atari 2600) in 1977, a year after they were acquired by Warner Bros. Dozens of titles from this period would generate substantial acclaim, and many of them would go on to appear in Version 5.0 of the Video Game Canon:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. Pong | 152.03 |
| 2. Asteroids | 159.74 |
| 3. Star Wars: The Arcade Game | 179.39 |
| 4. Adventure | 180.12 |
| 5. Warlords | 189.20 |
| 6. Missile Command | 189.21 |
| 7. Combat | 190.97 |
| 8. Breakout | 191.23 |
| 9. Battlezone | 193.09 |
| 10. Centipede | 195.20 |
| 11. Tempest | 196.29 |
| 12. Star Raiders | 196.98 |
| 13. Computer Space | 199.17 |
| 14. Gran Trak 10 | 199.26 |
| 15. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial | 200.62 |
| 16. Indy 500 | 201.30 |
| 17. Space Race | 203.47 |
| 18. Shark Jaws | 203.47 |
| 19. Atari Football | 203.47 |
| 20. Orbit | 203.47 |
| 21. Lunar Lander | 203.77 |
| 22. Night Driver | 205.80 |
| 23. Haunted House | 205.94 |
| 24. Swordquest: Earthworld | 205.98 |
| 25. Yars’ Revenge | 206.27 |
| 26. Super Breakout | 206.32 |
| 27. Crystal Castles | 206.35 |
Atari famously dumped a huge collection of unsold games in a landfill in 1983, and the company would split in two a year later, with Warner Bros. retaining the arcade business (as Atari Games) and Tramel Technology taking over the home console side (as Atari Corporation). However, even this divorce wouldn’t be final, Atari Games broke back into console publishing shortly after the NES’s debut, publishing games under the Tengen and Time Warner Interactive labels. The two companies actually coexisted for over a decade until Atari Games was sold to Midway in 1996.
Ironically, this era of Atari would produce some of the company’s most memorable games, but they would become more synonymous with other companies thanks to their appearance on the NES under the Tengen name and through a series of Midway-branded compilations released in the 2000s.
Here’s a look at the ones that fared best in the latest update to the Video Game Canon:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. Gauntlet | 153.38 |
| 2.Marble Madness | 186.30 |
| 3. Paperboy | 197.41 |
| 4. Super Sprint | 200.73 |
| 5. Rampart | 202.98 |
| 6. Gauntlet II | 204.15 |
| 7. 720° | 206.11 |
| 8. Hard Drivin | 206.42 |
Midway continued to use Atari Games as a publishing label for a few more years, though any official ties to the original Atari were completely severed. But the name lived on until 1998, and the remnants of the company were allowed to take credit for the launch of one of the last great arcade games, Gauntlet Legends, which was the sole representative from this era of Atari to garner a spot on the Video Game Canon:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. Gauntlet Legends | 206.24 |
Tramel Technology’s Atari Corporation tread a very different path from 1984 through 1998. As a console manufacturer, they produced three new platforms in an attempt to compete with Nintendo and Sega. The sparsely-supported Atari 7800 appeared in 1986, which was followed by the Lynx (a color handheld that was superior to the Game Boy in many ways) in 1989. Both platforms were pushed aside a few years later so that the Atari Corporation could focus on the launch of the Jaguar in 1993.
Marketed as the world’s first “64-bit” console, fewer than 100 games would be released for the Jaguar before it was discontinued in 1996. But though the console was buried after going head-to-head with the Sony PlayStation (and, to a lesser extent, the Sega Saturn), it did produce a handful of well-regarded games that captured a place on the Video Game Canon:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. Tempest 2000 | 187.83 |
| 2. Alien Vs Predator (1994 – Rebellion) | 205.82 |
Atari Corporation exited the console business after the Jaguar was discontinued and the company was acquired by Hasbro Interactive in 1998. The deal also included the rights to Atari’s original slate of arcade games and sequels to Pong and Centipede were produced during this time. Though they were moderately well-received, the Hasbro Interactive era of Atari is best known (as far as the Video Game Canon is concerned) as the birthplace of the RollerCoaster Tycoon franchise:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. RollerCoaster Tycoon | 199.81 |
Here’s where the story of Atari gets really messy. After some initial success, Hasbro Interactive found themselves caught up in Hasbro’s massive slump around the turn of the millennium. The toymaker was in dire straits, and one of the casualties was their video game division (including the Atari name), which was packed up and sold to French publisher Infogrames in 2001.
Infogrames had acquired several small game companies during the tail end of the 1990s, which allowed them to produce games under a wide range of publishing labels. But this wide reach was exactly why they didn’t have much of an identity of their own. So after acquiring Hasbro Interactive, the entire company rebranded as Atari in 2003.
Even after the rebrand, the company-formerly-known-as-Infogrames still didn’t have much of an identity with consumers. This era of the company is probably best remembered for the confusingly large Atari logo that appeared on the cover of Enter the Matrix, though a handful of other titles received some support in Version 5.0 of the Video Game Canon:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. Unreal Tournament 2004 | 201.29 |
| 2. Neverwinter Nights | 207.81 |
| 3. Enter the Matrix | 212.67 |
| 4. GTR 2 | 214.21 |
That was nearly 20 years ago, and the years since have not been kind to Atari. The company declared bankruptcy in 2013, forcing day-to-day operations to be run by a skeleton crew of fewer than a dozen people. But Atari was able to weather this storm and emerged from bankruptcy in 2014. Legally, it remains the same entity today.
So if you combined all the games from the six different iterations of Atari, you’d have a table that looks like this:
| TITLE | C-SCORE |
|---|---|
| 1. Pong | 152.03 |
| 2. Gauntlet | 153.38 |
| 3. Asteroids | 159.74 |
| 4. Star Wars: The Arcade Game | 179.39 |
| 5. Adventure | 180.12 |
| 6.Marble Madness | 186.30 |
| 7. Tempest 2000 | 187.83 |
| 8. Warlords | 189.20 |
| 9. Missile Command | 189.21 |
| 10. Combat | 190.97 |
| 11. Breakout | 191.23 |
| 12. Battlezone | 193.09 |
| 13. Centipede | 195.20 |
| 14. Tempest | 196.29 |
| 15. Star Raiders | 196.98 |
| 16. Paperboy | 197.41 |
| 17. Computer Space | 199.17 |
| 18. Gran Trak 10 | 199.26 |
| 19. RollerCoaster Tycoon | 199.81 |
| 20. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial | 200.62 |
| 21. Super Sprint | 200.73 |
| 22. Unreal Tournament 2004 | 201.29 |
| 23. Indy 500 | 201.30 |
| 24. Rampart | 202.98 |
| 25. Space Race | 203.47 |
| 26. Shark Jaws | 203.47 |
| 27. Atari Football | 203.47 |
| 28. Orbit | 203.47 |
| 29. Lunar Lander | 203.77 |
| 30. Gauntlet II | 204.15 |
| 31. Night Driver | 205.80 |
| 32. Alien Vs Predator (1994 – Rebellion) | 205.82 |
| 33. Haunted House | 205.94 |
| 34. Swordquest: Earthworld | 205.98 |
| 35. 720° | 206.11 |
| 36. Gauntlet Legends | 206.24 |
| 37. Yars’ Revenge | 206.27 |
| 38. Super Breakout | 206.32 |
| 39. Crystal Castles | 206.35 |
| 40. Hard Drivin | 206.42 |
| 41. Neverwinter Nights | 207.81 |
| 42. Enter the Matrix | 212.67 |
| 43. GTR 2 | 214.21 |
The Atari of 2022 is slowly crawling its way back to relevancy, especially thanks to a series of well-reviewed retro reboots (the latest, Breakout Recharged, launched last week), but a slew of other projects (including the Atari VCS microconsole, a cryptocurrency division, and a partnership to build Atari-branded hotels) continue to hamper their reputation.
It’s a little disappointing that the original Atari is long gone, but someone will keep the name alive (even if this particular version of Atari fizzles out) because there will always be value in that iconic logo. And when you think about it, that’s kind of comforting.