Atari co-founder helped pave the way for Pong
Ted Dabney, a largely self-taught electrical engineer, co-founded Atari and — by devising a way to move objects on a television screen — played a crucial role in creating Pong, the arcade game that helped launch the video-game industry.
Dabney was “the Steve Wozniak” of Atari, video-game historian Leonard Herman said, referring to the Apple co-founder whose engineering brilliance was sometimes overshadowed by chief executive Steve Jobs, the company’s public face.
Dabney died May 26 at his home in Clearlake, Calif. He was 81. The cause was esophageal cancer, his wife, Carolyn Dabney, said.
With Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, a onetime carnival barker, Dabney created the world’s first massproduced video game, a bulky and complicated arcade machine called Computer Space. The game was a commercial failure but a stepping stone to Pong, a digital version of ping-pong in which players move blocky white paddles up and down the screen.
While Pong went on to become a fixture of bars, pizza parlours, arcades and even hotels, spawning legions of imitators and a multibillion-dollar industry, Dabney soon parted ways with the company he helped build. He sold his share of Atari for $250,000 (U.S.), worked for semiconductor manufacturers and eventually ran a grocery store with his wife while living in the Sierra Nevada.
Until about a decade ago, his role in founding Atari and devising the circuitry that undergirded its earliest games was often overlooked.
“Bushnell was the frontman who did all the talking,” said Herman, who chronicled Dabney’s contributions in a 2009 article for the British video-game magazine Edge. “Ted never said anything … He never thought of what he did as a big deal. He walked away from the industry and never looked back.”
Yet his skill with circuitry, honed in part while serving in the Marine Corps after graduating high school, made him a pivotal figure in the history of early video games.
“He devised the form that the arcade game would take when he did Computer Space,” said Chris Garcia, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
Dabney, he said in a phone interview, built a standing cabinet to house the game’s circuit board, power supply and television monitor, and “his engineering methodology became a major influence on (Allan) Alcorn,” the engineer hired by Bushnell and Dabney to create Pong.