The Final Act: A Brief History of Companies and Their Names: Part 3

Back in the day you had to be a model just to stand
 next to a game they were so uncommon. 

Last week I promised a brief take on Atari, Coleco and Activision. As you may know all three of these companies were large players in the early eighties, before the industry crash of '83-'84. While I won't be covering the industry crash, these companies all had a hand in its beginning and its long lasting effects. For more information on the early industry crash I'd recommend checking out books such as Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Video Games (Leonard Herman, be warned, it's a pretty dry read),  The Ultimate History of Video Games (Richard L. Kent), and Replay: the History of Video Games (Tristan Donovan.) These fine books provide much more detail, and information, on the early years of the industry than I could possibly hope to do here. With that out of the way, onto the article.

A rainbow logo. This is going to become a trend. Trust me. 

Atari

In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a company called Syzygy Engineering, which designed and built the first arcade video game ever made: Computer Space. Based heavily on Steve "Slug" Russell's (and the Tech Model Railroad Club) earlier game Space War!, from the PDP-1 computer system , Computer Space had complicated controls, and a complex set of rules. The complicated setup and rules required a manual to be attached or near each machine, which did not go over well with the public, and was ultimately a failure. Cutting their losses and attempting to start again Bushnell and Dabney sought to start over, making arcade machines themselves. Finding Syzygy was already in use by another corporation Bushnell suggested Atari, a commonly used term in the game of go. Similar to the term check in the game of chess, atari is generally stated as an indicator that a player is about to aggressively take pieces from a competitor. A fitting name as Atari would soon dominate the video game industry.

In 1973, this was ultra Hi-tech.

In 1972, Bushnell and Dabney hired engineer Al Acorn and (allegedly) set him to the task of making a knock off of the Magnavox title Tennis as a test of his abilities. This knockoff was to be called Pong, and would shortly become a worldwide phenomenon. 

While Atari suffered some minor initial setbacks the company would rapidly and massively expand. With Atari dominating arcades and quickly becoming a household name, founder Bushnell sought to bring a home video game console to the market. Knowing it would be extremely expensive, and needing the money to publish his brainchild, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976. This influx of cash allowed Atari to release the Atari Video Computer System to the home market (later renamed the Atari 2600). While Bushnell remained with the company his disagreements with the new management, and the way they were handling the business, led to his dismissal from Atari in December, 1978. 

Words cannot describe how bad this game is.
Seriously, it crashed a multi-billion dollar industry.  Well, sort of.

Warner would see great success in the market through the rest of the seventies and into the early eighties. However the increase of competition lead to a "war" in video game console prices. Combined with poor company management and a glut of bad games, the Video Game War of the early eighties left consumers without confidence or desire to buy games. This collapse of confidence and quality control would eventually end with the video game market crashing during  late-1983 and early-1984, leading to many companies going bankrupt or defunct. 

Warner took huge losses, and saw its value decrease dramatically. During this period they also lost their CEO, Ray Kassar, due to insider trading. Kassar's replacement, James J. Morgan, would have less than a year before Warner sold Atari to businessman Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore International. Tramiel had run Commodore while it had produced the Commodore 64, and other computers, but under his direction had never truly forayed into the home video game console market. 

Jack Tramiel, AKA the man who killed Atari.
Look upon his face and weep. 

Under Tramiel's direction Atari would wander back and forth in profitability. Mainly focusing on the home computer market, several console products were tinkered with, including the re-release of  the Atari 2600, the Atari Lynx, and the Atari Jaguar. While all of these were somewhat innovative, none of these products did well at market, and were all deemed commercial failures. Combined with Atari's flagging sales in the home computer market, due to the rise of Windows and PC's over dedicated systems, Atari would soon be a company with no market it could survive in.

By 1996 Atari was essentially gone from the market, and would be acquired and sold repeatedly in a series of mergers and sell offs, eventually ending up as part of Infogrames Interactive in 2008. Using Atari's name and brands, Infogrames once again published under the Atari name. However after another merger/buyout Infogrames itself would change its name to Atari about a year later.

Since the rebranding, Atari has not exactly been a powerhouse of gaming, with several reports indicate they've taken heavy losses over the past few years. With Atari's well known, yet financially insubstantial IP's such as Frogger and Pong, it's hard to say whether we'll see them stick around for the long haul. With a history of being sold, traded, and being bought out repeatedly, I'd say the return of Atari as a powerhouse player is far from likely. 

This was apparently a time before rainbows became "uncool". Also known as  "Pre-1990".

Coleco

As a major player in the early video game console industry, Coleco had interesting and wildly different origins compared to its competitors. Coleco, short for Connecticut Leather Company, was founded in 1932, as a producer of shoe leather and "shoe findings" (whatever that is). Realizing the limitation of the market for shoe leather the Coleco corporation began producing leather craft kits for hobbyists in the 1950s. Their success in that area led them to expand their offerings and delve into plastics manufacturing and molding. By 1956 Coleco was focused almost completely on the toy market, producing products such as wading pools, and many different plastic toys, and by 1961 the leather division was sold off. 

They just don't make consoles like this anymore... Thank goodness. 

In the early rush of dedicated systems and "Pong-Clones", Coleco played a very important role. Their Telstar consoles were one of the few consoles rushed to market that made an impact on the home video game market, receiving continued sales. These high sales numbers were partly due to luck, but also due to well timed orders of microchips in an emerging market, and good marketing. Between 1976 and 1978, Coleco would release 14 variations of their Telstar consoles, culminating in the cartridge based Telstar Arcade in 1978. However, with the rise of Atari's VCS (aka 2600), and increasing competition in the market, the executives at Coleco knew they had to branch out. 

This is a lot cooler in real life. Honestly, I had a couple of these as a kid. 

Expanding into the then-popular handheld electronic games market Coleco continued to do well. With handheld sports titles, and "mini-arcade" tabeletop units, like Galaxian, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and Pacman, flying off the shelves, it seemed Coleco could do no wrong. 

Also making your system compatible with your competitors system is not a bad move. 

With the infusion of cash from their electronics division Coleco would soon release their second attempt into the home console market: the Colecovision. Coming out in August, 1982, the Colecovision was up against some heavy competition. Atari's powerful new 5200 home console would be released only 2 months later, and the VCS/2600 was still a major force in the market. Not just facing Atari, but several other home consoles, such as the Intellivision, and the also upcoming Vectrex systems, Coleco needed an ace up their sleeve. An ace they found with a near arcade-perfect conversion of Nintendo's massive hit Donkey Kong being  packed with every system sold. Coleco had managed to sign a temporary contract with Nintendo for the exclusive rights to Donkey Kong. Being able to leverage the exclusive and well made port of the massively successful arcade game,  Colecovision's flew off the shelf. Some estimates state that 500,000 Colecovision systems were sold during the 1982 holiday season alone, with nearly a million units sold by early 1983. However Coleco's good fortunes would not last. 

The actual dolls are just too creepy to post a picture of. 

Possibly seeing the writing on the wall for the home video game market, or more likely, looking to cash in at every opportunity possible, Coleco sought to expand their presence in the home electronics market. Setting their sites on the home computer market Coleco announced the Adam home computer at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in June, 1983, with a release in October of that same year. Seeing the home computer market take off in recent years, Coleco wanted a piece of the action. 

While the Adam was initially met with praise from the press, the final product had multiple weak points and high failure rates. Poor manufacturing quality, an incredibly high defect rate, and several unforeseen hardware issues, made the Coleco Adam a costly commercial flop. Combined with the sudden collapse of the video game market in late 1983, it was a mistake that would leave Coleco struggling to stay afloat. However 1983 wasn't a complete loss for Coleco, as they had released their wildly popular Cabbage Patch Kids dolls that same year to incredible popularity and demand. 

Even with the income from Cabbage Patch Kids dolls propping the company up during slowed video game sales, the combined losses of the Adam's colossal development and production costs, alongside the failing game market, would ultimately drive Coleco out of the electronics market by 1985. By 1988 Coleco was out of business altogether. 

From their meteoric rise in the toy industry, to a swift and heavy fall, Coleco is long gone, likely to never be seen again. Without the popularity or brand recognition that Atari attained in the early industry years, it's likely that we'll never hear of them again in the video game industry. That said, stranger things have happened, and you never know what the future may hold.

Rainbow themed logos were apparently all the rage in the eighties.
I mean seriously, how else do you account for this?

Activision

I feel Activision deserves more than just a passing mention, or simple footnote in the annals of video game history, and the video game industry as we know it. Despite not being a console manufacturer, I'm going to briefly touch on their origins here, alongside such major players as Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Atari. The reason being  Activision was the worlds first third-party video game developer.

After a grunt-ton of hard effort you were rewarded by this: a name of some
guy you've never heard of. Wow. Not going to lie, that's pretty metal.

Before Activision the only companies that produced games were the manufacturers of the consoles themselves. For instance this meant that if you owned an Atari VCS (2600), you could not play any ports, or conversions of games made by companies such as Coleco, or Intellivision. This was bad for the market in several ways. One major flaw in this system was that developers of games had little incentive to create anything beyond the bare minimum, as they saw no royalties, or benefits to high sales. In fact most programmers were not even allowed to put their names to their creations. The first programmer to sneak his name into a game, which was against company policy at the time, was Warren Robinett. By sneaking his name into Adventure, placing it inside a hidden room accessible only through a series of very specific, hard to uncover actions, Robinett created the world's first Easter egg to ever be hidden within a game. A revolutionary idea, but also a striking and sad example of how little respect such hard working programmers and developers received from the companies they worked for.

In 1979, frustrated with the lack of credit, and knowing that they were making the companies they worked for millions upon millions of dollars while not seeing any compensation for doing so, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead met with then Atari CEO Ray Kassar. They demanded royalties for their work, and their names to be included in their creations. Kassar, vastly underestimating and wildly misunderstanding their value to the company, insulted them, and told them ‘You are no more important to Atari than the person on the assembly line who puts the cartridges in the box.’

Or in other words: "You may have collectively made this company over $100 million;
but we don't care. Now get back to work, or you're fired code monkey."

Seeing they would get nowhere with Atari, and likely would receive the same treatment elsewhere, David Crane and Alan Miller left the company to form Activision. Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead would soon join them in their new venture. In turn Atari almost immediately saw the mistake of losing four of its best programmers and developers, and, instead of attempting to build bridges with the fledgling company, sued them. Over the next two years Atari's lawyers attempted to sue Activision out of business, citing copyright and patent infringement, as well as many other claims. Fortunately for Activision, and gaming as we know it, all of Atari's lawsuits were either thrown out of court, dismissed, or ruled in the favor of Activision, allowing third-party support to flourish.

This game is still awesome. 
If you disagree with that, you're probably under the age of 30. And wrong. 

Releasing titles such as Pitfall, Grand Prix, and Laser Blast, Activision quickly became a major player in the video game industry. However, as the industry crashed in the 1983, the founders of Activision spread to the winds, their losses driving them to start new and different companies, each with successes of their own.

Pitfall AND Guitar Hero?! They're on a roll!

While Activision has varied in its size and success over the years, it has certainly survived the times through hard work, smart leadership, providing quality products, constant innovation, and great games. Furthermore without the formation of Activision it's likely that gaming would not be the booming industry it is today. In their drive to see their just dues and credits given, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Bob Whitehead and Alan Miller changed not just video games, but the world as we know it. Brilliant men, and great examples of what dedication, hard work, and a strong sense of justice can do in the world.


Until next time, game on.