1972: Founded by Silicon Valley pioneer Nolan Bushnell. He got the ball rolling with Pong, one of the most successful early arcade games. 1975: Some 150,000 home versions of Pong are sold. 1976: Bushnell sells Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million. 1978: Bushnell leaves Atari to create Chuck E. Cheese pizza parlors. 1980: Fueled by the success of its home video system, Atari posts sales of $415 million. 1980: Atari introduces its first personal computer, which proves to be a money loser. 1983: The video game business stalls, leaving Atari $533 million in the red. 1984: Warner sells Atari to Jack Tramiel, who had been chief executive of Commodore, Atari's rival in the early home computer market. 1986: Persistence pays off as low-cost PCs help Atari rebound with a profit of $25 million. 1992: Atari loses a lawsuit in which it accused Nintendo of monopolizing the video game market. 1993: The company reorganizes, stripping away its overseas operations. Revenues drop from a peak of $452 million in 1988 to just $28.8 million. Late in the year, Atari introduces Jaguar, a video game system that boasts better performance than Nintendo and Sega systems but costs twice as much. 1994: Sega invests $40 million in Atari and gets access to the company's patent portfolio. 01/1996: Atari Interactive, a new division, is created to develop games for PCs and other platforms. 06/1996: Atari merges with JTS, a maker of computer disk drives. 02/1998: JTS sells its Atari assets (copyrights, trademarks, patents and other intellectual property) to Hasbro Interactive for $5 million.

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