About Atari History

Atari History is an independent reference on the hardware, games and companies that carried the Atari name. Most pages cover 1972 to 1996, the years of Atari, Inc., Atari Corporation and Atari Games; the corporate history and the timeline follow the name to its later owners.

The site is not affiliated with Atari SA, Atari Interactive, Atari Games, or the former Atari Historical Society. Atari and the names of Atari products are trademarks of their respective owners and appear here only to identify the machines and games being described.

How pages are written

Each page starts from period documents: Atari manuals and service manuals, press releases, trade and computer magazines of the time, newspaper reports, and later interviews with the engineers and executives involved. Dates, prices, production figures and specifications are listed with their sources at the foot of the page. When two sources disagree, the page says so and names both rather than picking one silently.

Drafts are prepared with the help of AI writing tools, then checked claim by claim against the cited sources before publication. Anything that cannot be traced to a source is left out.

The photographs show real hardware. They are public-domain or CC0 images, many of them taken in museums, and no image on the site is generated.

Old links from the Atari Historical Society

From the late 1990s this domain hosted the website of the Atari Historical Society. That site is long gone, but many of its addresses are still linked from Wikipedia articles, other sites and old bookmarks. Where the subject of an old page is covered here, its address leads to that page: a link to the former 520ST page opens the Atari 520ST page, and the old Sweet 16 page is back at its original address. Old addresses with no matching subject return an error page rather than sending visitors somewhere unrelated.

Corrections and documents

Corrections, scans of period documents and first-hand accounts are welcome at [email protected]. A correction is made when it can be supported by a source; first-hand accounts are attributed to the person who gave them, with their agreement.

At present the site carries no advertising and no affiliate links.