Atari entered the home videogames market as in 1976 with the Atari VCS 2600. This would be the best selling games machine until 1983. The first games were conversions of games Atari had brought to the arcades, but many more games arrived. This went well until the beginning of the 1980, with Atari yielding 1 billion dollars a year in 1981. But Atari was sold to Warner and many creatives left the company to from their own companies, like Activision.
Activision would later produces many hits for the Atari machines, like Pitfall and Decathlon. There is an Activision Macpack, which can be downloaded here. The Machine was updated with the 5200 and 7800, but those were marketed horribly. New competitors, like the Colecovision and the Intellivision arrived as well. Atari's home computers did quite well, but never matching Commodore or Sinclair.
And then the crash arrived. In 1984 people had seen one too many clone. All faith in the market was lost. The management of Atari deserted. When the dust settled down, a new system had conquered the marked. The era of Nintendo had started.
In the beginning of Atari's history two employees talked to Bushnell. They wanted to develop a homecomputer. Bushnell told them he didn't had the funds at that time, as everything went into marketing the VCS 2600. They left the company. Their names: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. A few months later they founded Apple
(Combat, VCS, 1976 emulated by Stella)