Release date: 1979

In 1979 the Atari VCS was still finding its feet. Sales rose to about 600,000 consoles, taking the total past 1.3 million. Nolan Bushnell, who had urged Warner to start work on a successor, left Atari that year, and on 1 October four Atari programmers founded Activision, the first company to make games for another company’s console.
Atari’s own 1979 releases on this page are mostly board, card and sports games. Video Chess, by Larry Wagner and Bob Whitehead, arrived in November and fitted a working chess opponent into a machine with 128 bytes of RAM. Backgammon, Bowling, Miniature Golf, the parachute game Sky Diver and David Crane’s Slot Machine complete the picture. BASIC Programming is filed here as well, although it is usually dated to 1980.
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