Ted Dabney
Co-founder of Atari, whose computer tennis challenge, Pong, was one of the earliest arcade games
TED DABNEY, who has died aged 81, was the co-founder of the electronic games company Atari; in the early Seventies, he devised the circuitry behind the first successful video arcade game, Pong, which in time spawned the huge modern computer games industry.
In 1971, Dabney started Atari with a colleague at the US electronics firm Ampex, Nolan Bushnell. Both men were keen players of the ancient Chinese game Go and took their company’s name from a term with a meaning similar to “check” in chess.
At Stanford, Bushnell had seen a rocket game called Spacewar being played on the university’s computer by researchers. He reasoned that if it could be commercialised it would be popular in bars offering diversions such as pinball. But computers then were both expensive and large.
He persuaded Dabney, an electrical engineer, to leave his well-paid job to build him a smaller computer which could be housed in its own freestanding cabinet. Dabney’s breakthrough was to realise, in answer to a query of Bushnell’s, that a dot could be made to appear and move on a screen by tweaking the circuits of an ordinary television.
This meant that they could dispense entirely with a separate computer and, having evicted his daughter from her bedroom, Dabney created the circuitry there from cheap television parts. The game was displayed on an ordinary set used as a monitor.
Their Computer Space units sold well but bars complained that the game was too recherché for their beer-and-nuts crowd. Bushnell hired another Ampex employee, Allan Alcorn, to programme more games. Using Dabney’s circuits, Alcorn created a tennis game, with a dot as the ball and two controllable lines as the rackets, to Bushnell’s specifications.
They called it Pong, having ruled out Ping as that was the name of a manufacturer of golf clubs. Dabney made the coin slot from one used in a laundromat. The first that the trio knew of the game’s appeal was when Alcorn went to mend a machine that had broken and discovered that the problem was that there were so many 25c pieces in it that it had shorted.
Pong’s effect was to be transformative, as for many people it was their first, futuristic experience of interacting with a computer screen. (Bushnell later settled out of court with Magnavox, a firm that had made a similar game which he had seen demonstrated.) In 1977, Atari began to bring computer games into people’s homes with their 2600 video system, which let them play on their televisions. It was soon the fastest growing company in US history.
Yet in 1973, Dabney had left it as his relationship with Bushnell soured. He complained that his name had not been on the patent for the video circuits and that he had been frozen out of important meetings. He sold his half-share in Atari for $250,000 – in 1976 Bushnell sold Atari to Warners for $26 million – and until recently his contribution to the games revolution was largely forgotten.
He was born Samuel Frederick Dabney on May 2 1937 in San Francisco. After his parents divorced, he was brought up by his father, an accountant. He was not considered academic at school and at 16 had already begun working building roads when an inspirational teacher belatedly sparked his interest in algebra. After losing a job as a surveyor, Dabney joined the US Marines, studying electronics in depth during his three years of service.
In 1959 he went to work for Bank of America, which was then building the first automated reader of cheques (a development that led to the introduction of numbered cheques and account numbers).
Two years later, after a brief stint at Hewlett-packard, Dabney was hired as a system designer by Ampex, known for their reel-to-reel tape recorders used in the music business; their principal early backer had been Bing Crosby. Dabney worked in the military division on a method of transmitting electronically the images captured on film by the U2 spy plane.
After leaving Atari, he worked for companies such as Fujitsu and the technology firm Teledyne. Despite his differences with Bushnell, he later helped him with technical aspects of what became the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain. Latterly he ran a grocery.
His first marriage, to Joan Wahrmund, ended in divorce. He is survived by the two daughters of that marriage, and by his second wife Carolyn.
Ted Dabney, born May 2 1937, died May 26 2018