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There are names (of person, car, of computer, ...) that just by pronouncing them, they evoke a series of memories and sensations. They have their mystique.

In the field of computingFor fans, the name Atari has almost magical connotations, which transport us to a time that, idealized, will always seem better to us.

Atari was an American hardware and software manufacturer, known for its computers and game consoles in the 1980s, and as a video game publisher.

Before founding Apple, Steve Jobs worked for Atari (and, collaterally, so did Steve Wozniak, since Jobs asked him for help).

We must differentiate the original Atari, founded in 1972, from the company that currently operates the Atari brand, which is the one that holds its rights but does not emanate directly from the original company.

The first product that made Atari successful was the Atari 2600 game console, which came out with a version of Pong, a very simple game. similar in essence to tennis, in which the screen was divided into two parts by a vertical line, the players each had a line in the rear of their field that they could only move up and down and vice versa (never back and forth), and in which a ball.

If the bar did not touch the ball, it was lost in the back of the field and this represented a point for the rival.

If you miss the simplicity of this game, think about the key technology early 70's; it was what technology allowed then.

Atari produced a series of highly successful video games, which gave him income and fame, although this not only came from home game consoles, but Atari was also thriving in the arcade market.

In the eighties, the North American company entered the personal microcomputer market.

Especially remembered from that time was the Atari ST. Atari's were computers that initially competed in benefits with the Commodore Amiga, although the fate of the company (which, in the end, would be the same for Amiga) would make it fall out of the fight.

The bad perception of the evolution of the market on the part of the directors of Atari (which, by the way, had been sold to Warner by its founder, Nolan Bushnell) led to a series of notorious failures, which drove both sales and fame of the business.

The biggest fiasco of the company, and which has constituted perhaps the most famous urban legend in the world of video games until its recent verification, was the commercial failure of the video game ET the alien which led Atari to scrap thousands of copies as they were literally unsaleable. People did not want them or give them away.

What was original was the way they got rid of them: by secretly burying them in the desert from New Mexico in 1983.

What was an urban legend with a certain solid base was contrasted in April 2014, in what can be considered the world's first archaeological excavation of the computing or video games, and that resulted in the discovery of thousands of cartridges of this title and some others that did not achieve the expected success.

At various stages, Atari was separated into parts from its various departments and sold in parts to various buyers.

Currently, the Atari name is still valid in the market, there is a video game production company that uses it, but that is practically all that we can find for it. inheritance from the historic Atari.

Gone are such outstanding titles that marked an entire generation such as Pong, Asteroids, Pac-man, or Centipede, and that have become part of popular culture.

Also behind are game consoles like the aforementioned Atari 2600, and the Lynx and Jaguar, and computers like the 16-bit Atari ST, or the 32-bit Falcon.

Photos: Fotolia - 3Dfrance / Vadim Ponomarenko

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