Each of these firms represented kernels of ideas that would become successful decades later, in the hands of firms like Sony, Texas Instruments, Time Warner, Amazon, and Valve. But theres another highlight of Bushnells bio that has long gone undocumented: pioneer of the high-tech incubator. Within the first year, Catalyst was funding 10 separate technology firms. It was called the Spot Motion Circuit, and it allowed a dot to move up, down, left and right on a screen. It created the industry.. Several months later, they released the table-tennis game "Pong" to worldwide acclaim. In 1995, the Dabneys opened a grocery store and deli called Mountain Market in the tiny mountain town of Crescent Mills, Calif. The men found inspiration in a computer system they had seen at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. When I worked at Apple, I was an Apple fellow, he says. Thats how he and I got to know each other., In many ways, Bushnell says, leaving Atari was liberating. The Untold Story of Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell's Visionary 1980s Tech Incubator After bringing us Pong and Chuck E. Cheese's, the legendary entrepreneur built a startup factory that tackled. [citation needed] BrainRush rolled out the full platform in the fall of 2013. They called it Pong. Then he brought in John Anderson, the former CFO of Atari, to handle the financial side. Mr. Dabney used cheap television components to create an interactive motion system and, in 1971, the worlds first commercial video game, Computer Space. The company was venture capital funded in 2012. The product was so fascinating, but the technology was so hard that I kept funding it and funding it.. A computer was too slow to do anything at video speeds anyway, Mr. Alcorn said. And if that means an award is the price I have to pay personally so the whole industry may be more aware and sensitive to these issues, I applaud that, too. Having seen a computerized table tennis game, he directed Mr. Alcorn to build something similar using Mr. Dabneys circuitry. Undeterred, they continued their partnership, Syzygy, by founding Atari, Inc.. (Another company, it turned out, had first dibs on "Syzygy.") . He would be constantly talking to people all the time, says Caloff.