When I first saw the above phrase on the Internet this morning I was rather taken aback.  Surely Atari isn’t that old!  Quickly I rushed to Wikipedia, though, where they confirmed it: “Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27, 1972.”

Now Atari didn’t invent the video game, nor did they invent the arcade video game or the home console system.  They did, however, popularize these things and prove that video games were a profitable and interesting thing to go into.  Pong was the first game to really take arcades by storm, and while the Magnavox Odyssey might have been the first console, it was the Atari 2600 that wound up in the home of so many kids in the early 80s.  It was certainly in mine.

Thanks to Nolan Bushnell and Atari, games went on to become first a cultural phenomenon and then the art form that they are today.  So stop and take a moment to reflect on the last forty years, and enjoy a slice of the cake: