Dabney’s Work Had a Huge Impact on Gaming
Ted Dabney, who co-founded Atari along with Nolan Bushnell, has died at at 81. His death was announced on Facebook by Leonard Herman, the author of the video game history book series Phoenix.
Dabney’s work was important throughout the history of both Atari and video games in general. However, his early-1970s engineering work is most notable due to its role in the creation of Computer Space—the second coin-operated adaptation of Spacewar!—which laid the foundation for Atari.
Nolan Bushnell even credited Dabney with most of Computer Space’s technical accomplishments.
“We were good friends and Ted had a lot of analogue computer skills I didn’t have,” he said. “I was a digital guy. I knew how to deal with bits and bytes and logic and things like that and Ted really understood a lot more about how to interface with a consumer television set and power supplies and things like that.”
Dabney ended up selling his portion of Atari ownership to Bushnell in 1973, although he claims that it was more due to Bushnell pushing him out than his own desires.
“There’s stories that came around after that,” Dabney said. “But that was the end of me with it, with Atari. ‘Cause it was just— well, actually Nolan had told me that if I didn’t sell out he would transfer all the assets to another corporation and leave me with nothing anyway. So, you know, might as well sell out.”
But Dabney said he remained friends with his co-founder despite the bumps in their business relationship. After he left Atari, he was a computer engineer for many companies, including Teledyne and Raytheon, before he purchased and ran a grocery store with his wife for a few years. He moved to Washington afterwards, where he stayed until he passed away.
Ted Dabney was a crucial part of the early video game industry and created hardware that paved the way for everything we enjoy from the industry today.