In October 1977 the VCS was released for $249.95. Nine games were available for its launch, and initial sales were disappointing.

Bushnell had a falling out with Warner, so in 1978, he left. With it, Warner management introduced a new style to Atari: dress codes and time cards, ending the old Atari "hacker" culture. Bushnell signed a five-year agreement not to compete with Atari and bought his Pizza Time Theater (Chuck E. Cheese) franchise back from Warner.

Videogames started getting increasingly popular in 1979, but the VCS wasn't exactly breaking any sales records. That is until 1980, when Atari became the first company to port an arcade game to cartridge. The game? Space Invaders. Space Invaders for the VCS hit the streets in January, 1980 and was a huge hit. Many people bought the VCS just to play Space Invaders, as Warner had predicted. The future of Atari looked bright.

But that same year, a group of high-profile Atari programmers, disgruntled over Atari's policy of giving little or no credit to the creators, left the company. David "Pitfall" Crane, Larry "Combat" Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead (creators of many Atari sports games) left Atari to form Activision, a company which later developed some of the VCS's best games. Atari wasn't very happy about having to deal with this new competition (as Atari was the sole producer of VCS games prior to Activision's formation), and at the time they didn't realize that this was the beginning of the end. Other companies started to join the fray, and soon more and more VCS titles (of varying quality) appeared on the shelves.

At this time all what I can provide is the following emulator screenshots:

More information will become available once I have more to tell…

Last Revised: July 12, 2000