Ted Dabney

Cofounder of Atari

• Born: May 2, 1937
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: May 26, 2018
• Place of death: Clearlake, California

Primary Company/Organization: Atari

Introduction

With Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney cofounded both Syzygy Engineering (in 1971) and Atari, Inc. (in 1972). The latter became the first major success of the newborn video game industry. Dabney and Bushnell created the first coin-operated arcade game, Computer Space, based on Steve Russell's Spacewar! game—just as Atari's successful Pong was an adaptation of the table tennis game included with the Magnavox Odyssey home video game console. With the passage of time, Bushnell's role in video game history was magnified, in part through his own efforts, leaving Dabney in the shadows of the footlights.

Early Life

Ted Dabney was born Samuel Frederick Dabney Jr. in 1937 in Sand Francisco, California. He was raised by his father after his parents' divorce, and went on to study at trade schools and San Mateo High School before entering the military in 1955. While in the Marine Corps he was given electronics courses as part of his training, which began his interest in electrical engineering. He left the Marine Corps in 1959 and found employment with the Bank of America's technology research wing.

Dabney then took a job at technology company Hewlett-Packard before joining the engineering firm Ampex, which had been involved both in the space program and in early video recording technology, in 1961. There he met Nolan Bushnell, his future business partner. Dabney worked on the firm's military products for six years before transferring to the Video File unit in Sunnyvale, California. Video File was an Ampex technology that allowed recording of images and video to rhodium discs, providing fast access to visual information often used by law enforcement and hospitals, such as fingerprints, mug shots, and medical records.

Meanwhile, Dabney and Bushnell became friends and discussed ideas, including Bushnell's concept of a restaurant incorporating aspects of an arcade or carnival. They also became fascinated with the emerging field of computer games, and experimented with ways to bring the technology to wider audiences through cheaper hardware. Soon Dabney and Bushnell went into business together, eventually forming the engineering firm Syzygy in 1971 and releasing the first coin-operated video game: Computer Space.

Life's Work

Computer scientist Steve Russell had invented the early computer gameSpacewar! in 1962. Although it was not the first game run on a computer—it was the third—it was the first to become well known in the computer field, and it was the result of hundreds of hours of labor to write code for a game inspired by the space-opera science fiction of E. E. "Doc" Smith. The result was a two-player game in which each player maneuvered a spaceship while trying to fire photon torpedoes on the opposing player's spaceship and avoid the dangerous gravitational pull of the sun. The game was never made commercial; instead, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)—which had provided the PDP-1 computer for which it was written to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the hope that the school would find marketable applications for it—included Spacewar! with its computers as a diagnostic program. Russell later transferred to Stanford University, where he met Bushnell and introduced him to Spacewar!

On Bushnell's prompting, Dabney adapted Spacewar! for an arcade game by creating a custom-made video circuit using a black-and-white television as its display device. Computer Space was hard-wired into logic circuits rather than existing as a program running on a computer, bypassing the need for expensive computer components. The game was a little simpler than Spacewar! (the gravity hazard was omitted, and it was played as a single-player game with UFOs as targets instead of an opposing second player) and was built using small-scale integrated circuits on printed circuit boards. Computer Space also added a few features the Spacewar! lacked, mainly a sound circuit developed by Dabney, which added sound effects using Zener diodes, and a "win screen" consisting of the player's spaceship being "sent into hyperspace" (which was accomplished by inverting the video, another addition by Dabney). The game was housed in a relatively small cabinet, setting a lasting trend for arcade games.

Computer Space was released by Nutting Associates, a Mountain View, California, arcade game manufacturer that had previously released coin-operated trivia games. Fewer than two-thirds of the units manufactured were sold, although the game made a memorable splash in the industry and appeared in the movie Soylent Green. Dabney and Bushnell formed their own company, Syzygy Engineering, and sought the right game to develop for commercial potential. Discarding the idea of a driving game as too complex for players under driving age, Bushnell decided on an arcade version of the Magnavox Odyssey's table tennis game, which they marketed as Pong, using the same motion circuitry that Dabney had developed for Computer Space. By the time Pong was released, Syzygy had reorganized as Atari, Inc., a name Dabney suggested, because an unrelated company was already doing business under the name Syzygy. Pong was released to great success, though Atari was forced to pay a licensing fee after the makers of the Magnavox Odyssey sued for intellectual property infringement.

In order to circumvent the exclusive contracts that some venues wanted, Bushnell created a separate company, Kee Games, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari but posed as a competitor. This way, whether a venue insisted on an exclusive contract signed with Atari or Kee, the business was still Atari's. In a dispute over the ethics and pragmatics of this arrangement, Dabney wound up leaving the company in 1978, selling his stake to Bushnell for $250,000. Bushnell himself left later that year, and the two would continue to maintain a rocky relationship. They collaborated again when Bushnell realized his vision of an arcade restaurant, with Dabney devising technology to notify customers when their food was ready. That business developed into the Chuck E. Cheese pizza chain.

Personal Life

An avid game player, Dabney's favorite game was Go (from which the name Atari originates). He worked part-time repairing pinball machines in Atari's early days and returned to that work after Bushnell bought out his share of the company. He was rarely in the public eye afterward, although in the early twenty-first century he participated in some message board threads about the golden age of video games, sometimes sparring with his former partner Bushnell. He did continue with some computer engineering projects, most for personal use such as recipe and banking programs for his second wife, with whom he ran a grocery store in Crescent Mills, California, from 1995 into the early 2000s.

Dabney married and had two daughters with Joan Wahrmund, though the couple later divorced. His second wife was Carolyn (Madison) Dabney. On May 26, 2018, Dabney died of esophageal cancer at the age of eighty-one at his home in Clearlake, California.

Bibliography

Bowles, Nellie. "Ted Dabney, a Founder of Atari and a Creator of Pong, Dies at 81." The New York Times, 31 May 2018,www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/obituaries/ted-dabney-dead-atari-pong.html. Accessed 6 July 2018.

Dillon, Roberto. The Golden Age of Video Games: The Birth of a Multibillion Dollar Industry. New York: CRC, 2011. Print. This history of video games virtually begins with Atari and thus gives the company ample coverage.

Dwyer, Colin. "Ted Dabney, Co-Founder of Atari and Video Game Pioneer, Dies at 81." NPR, 1 June 2018, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/06/01/616191252/ted-dabney-co-founder-of-atari-and-video-game-pioneer-dies-at-81. Accessed 6 July 2018.

Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge: MIT, 2009. Print. A much more technically informed and literate look at Atari than provided by histories more concerned with the cultural impact or entertainment value of the games.

Ramsay, Morgan. Games at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play. New York: Apress, 2012. Print. An interview-based history of video games, including an interview with Dabney's partner at Atari, Bushnell.