During its years of operation, it developed and produced over 350 arcade, console, and computer games for its own systems, and almost 100 ports of games for home computers such as the Commodore 64.
Atari began its operations by developing and producing some of the first arcade video games; the first commercial arcade video game, Computer Space, was released in November 1971 by Atari founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in partnership as Syzygy Engineering.
The arcade game market is split into manufacturers, distributors, and operators; manufacturers like Atari sell game machines to distributors—who handle several types of electronic machines—who in turn sell them to the operators of locations.
In July 1984, as a result of falling sales due to the video game crash of 1983, Atari, Inc. was split apart by Warner Communications; the arcade division continued as a subsidiary of Warner under the name Atari Games, while the console and computer games divisions were sold off as Atari Corporation.
[5] Atari's dedicated consoles and many of their early console games were licensed for sale through Sears, which often sold them under a different name, on some occasions months prior to the Atari-branded version.