What's What! Video Game Facts (16/365)

The Atari brand is very easily associated with nostalgia, considered the founder of the video game industry, since it has been around the early days of arcade machines and also creator of one of the first video game consoles, it was founded in the United States in 1972 for a couple of young Americans Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, quickly becoming one of the most successful companies in the field of video games on its own merit with games such as Pac-man, Pong and Asteroids until in 1984, the original Atari Inc. was split due to its role in the video game crash of 1983.

Atari was originally called Syzygy, an astronomical term. However, that name had already been registered by another company, so Bushnell wrote some words from the game Go, and chose the word Atari which in Chinese it is used in situations "that a stone or a group of stone is in danger of being captured by your opponent leaving only one liberty move ".

The name "Atari" was chosen by Bushnell because of the appeal of its origin, it is also easy to memorize, in terms of pronunciation and writing, in most markets.

I also discovered that there is a Go modality called Atari-Go AKA Capture Go, follows the same rules as traditional go, but a win is achieved by simply capturing one or more stones, the number of stones needed to win must be agreed before starting the game, the single-stone Capture Go it is the most common.

Incredible that the Go game has more than 2,500 years ago and has inspired the name of one of the pioneering companies of video games.