Nostalgia will reign over Silicon Valley in August when former Atari employees – the coin-op side of the company, not the ‘home games division’ - will hold a reunion to mark the 40th anniversary of the company’s formation.
A few former executives of the company got together and decided that the anniversary needed to be marked, so August 18 was chosen as the date for the event and invitations were sent out to everyone who worked at the company. Atari Games was the company set up by Nolan Bushnell when he invented the video game – a ping-pong game initially – and was joined by a succession of entrepreneurial characters who went on to other things in the amusement industry.
Busnell himself is apparently going to attend, along with Gene Lipkin, Frank Ballouz and Sue Elliott. There will be a number of noted distributors from the old days attending, including the Bettlemans, Rich Babich, Mark Singer and Jerry Marcus, who was both an employee and a distributor at different times.
Kevin Hayes, who was instrumental in setting up the Irish factory for the company and who subsequently moved to California to head Namco’s operation in the US, is also going and tells us that so far out of about 500 invitations, 251 have indicated that they will attend.
The reunion will be held at Campbell, California.
