Atari company history

These articles follow the companies rather than the machines. They start with the founding of Atari in 1972 and the arcade games that paid for everything else, then the years under Warner Communications, the losses of 1983, and the split of July 1984 that left one company with the consoles and computers and another with the arcade business.

For a single list of dates across all of these, see the Atari timeline. The hardware has its own sections: Atari computers and Atari consoles.