Crash Course Games

Atari and the Business of Video Games (1x4)

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Today, Andre is going to talk about the rise of Atari and with it the rise of the video game industry. So if you remember from last episode, we mentioned that the first arcade machine, Galaxy Game, happened to have a coin slot, but this was just the beginning. Nolan Bushnell, often considered the Father of the Video Game Industry, saw the opportunity for the commercialization of video games. Bushnell founded Atari and oversaw the development of its first game - Pong. And then, through some questionably ethical business strategies, Bushnell was able to get his machines into arcades all across the United States. But if this is all Atari had done, we probably wouldn’t be dedicating an entire episode to it. Atari also played a major role in getting video games into the home with the Atari 2600 console. Video games were becoming a part of peoples’ everyday lives and they were becoming a part of popular culture. But Atari wasn’t the only video game company in the 1970s, it wasn’t even the first. So we’re going talk about some of the other companies that took part in the war for a place in our living rooms next week!