Clarification and
History
Before we begin, I need to more clearly define what I mean,
exactly, by "Atari." The
company's name is a term from Go; when a group of stones is one move away from
being captured, they are said to be in "atari."
Founded as
"Atari Inc.", the company was famously created by Nolan Bushnell to
produce Pong machines in the early '70s,
and there was no ambiguousness in the use of its name until Jack Tramiel bought
the company off of Warner Communications after the great game crash of 1983,
when mainstream tastes suddenly shifted away from the video game fad.
Tramiel, fresh after helming Commodore's success with the
Commodore 64 home computer and seeking a repeat, bought only Atari's consumer
electronics division from Warner. While Tramiel's "Atari Corp." did
okay for a while, giving us the Atari 8-bit computers, the Atari ST, and the Jaguar,
it didn't last as long as the arcade company -- Atari Games.
It's worth noting now that this article is not interested in
the Tramiel Atari, the consumer products of the old Atari, Inc., nor will it
cover Atari Games' home publishing efforts, either under the name Tengen or
their own. We're interested solely in arcade games.
Atari Games' ownership changed hands frequently at that time,
but that didn't prevent it from experiencing a great creative flowering. This
is the era that gave us Marble Madness,
Gauntlet, 720 Degrees, Atari's version of Tetris,
Klax, Toobin', Vindicators, Xybots,
Hard Drivin', S.T.U.N. Runner and many other unique games. Eventually Atari
Games was sold to former competitor WMS, a.k.a. Williams Electronics, who also
owned former competitor Midway.
The company's creative ascendancy seems to have ended around
1992. According to developer interviews from the various console compilations
that have been released, Atari's developers had been continually stymied by the
difficulty in coming up with original arcade ideas that tested well against
fighting games, causing many projects to be abandoned.
 One of the abandoned games was the sequel to Marble Madness, Marble Man.
Little other than fighting games and racers tested well. Atari Games even tried
making a couple of fighters of its own, with the most famous example being the
moderately successful dinosaur fighter Primal
Rage.
Some of the company's late successes include the Area 51/Maximum Force series of light gun games, the San Francisco Rush series of "exploratory"
racing games, and Gauntlet sequels Legends and Dark Legacy.
By the time of Gauntlet
Dark Legacy, the company had been
renamed Midway Games West, and had found some work on the home adaptations of
some of its arcade hits, but the continued implosion of U.S. arcades doomed the
studio. Midway left arcades in 2001, and disbanded the studio formerly known as
Atari Games in 2003. These days, the name "Atari" is used only by
Infogrames.
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The speed was unparalleled for 1978, and featured two steering wheels, as it was meant to be played with one player controlling the front, and another at the back. Unfortunately the game is completely broken if you just play the back end, as the computer will drive the front flawlessly for you, and you have more time to adjust if you're in back, but still, it was pretty neat for the time. I also quite liked how the game would reverse image polarity when you reached a certain point - everything black became white. Goooood times.
Heh heh heh... good one, Ed & Atari. Good one. I hope you're enjoying the fancy car I must have bought for you. :)
There were a few of mistakes I thought that should be corrected.
Asteroids was not the first game to have controls where a ship had left/right buttons and thrusted in the direction the ship was facing. That belongs to what many consider the first video game, Space Wars which was released in the arcade by Cinematronic and pre-dates Asteroids by several years in creation and at least a year in the arcades.
Tramil was not responsible for the Atari 8bit systems. He was at Commodore, making Atari's competitor at the time. He may have been around for a few of the last models.
Also, where did you get the info that Marble Madness used the POKEY chip for its sound? Having programmed the POKEY for many years I would never have guessed it could make those sounds, at least not unassisted.
And Gregg's suspicions are correct: Marble Madness did not use POKEY for sound. That duty was handled by a Yamaha YM2151, the sound chip developed for Yamaha's line of DX synthesizer keyboards. Atari's Marble Madness was the first arcade game to use it.
There is some confusion about Space Wars. Cinematronic's Space Wars was released in 1977, two years before Asteroids. It was inspired by the 1962 DEC PDP-1 computer game Spacewar!, which is sometimes credited as the first video game or graphical computer game (although it missed that honor by decade). Spacewar! was never a coin-op, but another game that was inspired by it was, and it was the first. It was called Computer Space, and like Asteroids, had Spacewar!-like controls. It was released in 1971 and was created by future Atari founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
In the interest of fairness, I'll mention that the very, very first coin-op video game was another Spacewar! inspired game called The Galaxy Game. It was released two months before Computer Space. Only one them was ever made, and at 10 cents a play on $20,000 worth of hardware, it could never be economically viable, so I'm not sure it should be considered a legitimate coin-op.
Deleted the bit about POKEY being responsible for MM's sounds.
Thanks for the tips.