Atari co-founder Ted Dabney has passed away

Ted Dabney has passed away at the age of 81. Dabney is co-founder of Atari, together with Nolan Bushnell, and was one of the founders of the famous arcade game Pong. He had been seriously ill for some time.

Dabney had been suffering from esophageal cancer for some time and his doctors had told him he would not get better. A friend of Dabney announced his death in a post on Facebook.

The Atari co-founder was born in 1937 in San Francisco and worked at Bank of America, among others, until he eventually ended up at the Ampex company. There he met Nolan Bushnell, with whom he subsequently founded Syzygy, in the year 1971. This company is the predecessor of Atari; the name was changed because there was already another company called Syzygy.

Computer Space was the first game released by Syzygy, but with the release of Pong in 1972, already under the company name Atari, great success was achieved for the first time. Shortly after, in 1973, Dabney left the company after arguing with Bushnell over his position within the company. According to friends, Dabney would also never have been able to handle the business side of the game industry well.