The word Atari comes from the board game Go, where it describes a player on the brink of capturing an opponent's stones. That turns out to be the perfect metaphor for a company that spent five decades on the edge. This episode untangles the confusing life story of the Atari name, from Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founding Syzygy Engineering in 1971 to the March 2024 partnership bringing Atari Recharged titles back into physical arcade cabinets.

Along the way we cover the Pong-inspired logo, the secret Kee Games shell company used to beat pinball distributors, the $28 million sale to Warner Communications, the 1983 crash and the broken Pac-Man port, the split into Atari Corporation and Atari Games, the Lynx and Jaguar, Tengen's reverse-engineering of Nintendo's lockout chip, the JTS reverse merger, Hasbro's $5 million purchase, Infogrames w ...