Atari Incorporated

Atari Incorporated's pinball line grew out of the video game company Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972. By the mid-1970s, arcade operators were looking for more than video games on their floors, and Atari organized a pinball division in 1975, applying its solid-state electronics expertise to the format. Its first release, The Atarians, arrived in 1976 as one of the earliest widebody pinball machines on the market, using an extra-wide cabinet to hold a larger, busier playfield than standard-body tables of the era. Every Atari pinball machine that followed kept that widebody format.

Time 2000 followed in 1977, the same year Steve Ritchie designed his first pinball machine for the company, Airborne Avenger. Middle Earth came out in 1978, splitting its widebody playfield into two separate play areas, each with its own set of flippers; Space Riders was released the same year. Superman, in 1979, was Ritchie's last design for Atari — he left that year to join Williams, where he designed Flash. Atari's largest release, and one of its last, was Hercules, also 1979: an enormous machine that used an oversized cue ball for a pinball and flippers built from washing-machine parts, and is still widely regarded as the largest pinball machine ever put into mass production. Only a few hundred were built.

Superman and Hercules marked the end of Atari's production pinball run. As arcade video games came to dominate the coin-op business, the company shelved further plans; Road Runner got only as far as prototype hardware, a planned Wonder Woman machine never made it past concept art, and Atari left pinball manufacturing behind for good.