Pushing Buttons: Happy 50th birthday to Atari, whose simple games gave us so much

In this week's newsletter: As the revolutionary company celebrates a half-century, we look back at everything video games owe to Atari

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This week marks a truly important video game anniversary: it is 50 years since Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney incorporated Atari Inc, the company that laid the foundations for the video games industry. There have been many appraisals of the company and its landmark achievements in the games press over the past few days - from the arrival of a Pong machine in Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972, through classic titles such as Breakout, Asteroids and Missile Commands, to the iconic home consoles. So many moments of creative genius, so many genres, concepts and conventions bursting into existence at the hands of scruffy engineers and designers such as Ed Logg, Larry Kaplan and Dona Bailey.