Ted Dabney, a largely self-taught electrical engineer who co-founded Atari and — by devising a way to move objects on a television screen — played a crucial role in creating Pong, the coin-operated arcade game that helped launch the video-game industry, died May 26 at his home in Clearlake, Calif. He was 81.
The cause was esophageal cancer, said his wife, Carolyn Dabney.
Dabney was “the Steve Wozniak” of Atari, said video-game historian Leonard Herman, referring to the Apple co-founder whose engineering brilliance was sometimes overshadowed by chief executive Steve Jobs, the company’s public face.
With Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, a onetime carnival barker, Dabney created the world’s first mass-produced video game, a bulky and complicated arcade machine called Computer Space. The game was a commercial failure but a steppingstone to Pong, a digital version of ping-pong in which players move blocky white paddles up and down the screen.
While Pong went on to become a fixture of bars, pizza parlors, arcades and even hotels, spawning legions of imitators and a multibillion-dollar industry, Dabney soon parted ways with the company he helped build. He sold his share of Atari for $250,000, worked for semiconductor manufacturers and eventually ran a grocery store with his wife while living in the Sierra Nevada.
Until about a decade ago, his role in founding Atari and devising the circuitry that undergirded its earliest games was often overlooked.
“Bushnell was the frontman who did all the talking,” said Herman, who chronicled Dabney’s contributions in a 2009 article for the British video-game magazine Edge.
“Ted never said anything. … He never thought of what he did as a big deal. He walked away from the industry and never looked back.”
Yet his skill with circuitry, honed in part while serving in the Marine Corps after graduating high school, made him a pivotal figure in the history of early video games.
“He devised the form that the arcade game would take when he did Computer Space,” said Chris Garcia, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
Dabney, he said in a phone interview, built a standing cabinet to house the game’s circuit board, power supply and television monitor, and “his engineering methodology became a major influence on (Allan) Alcorn,” the engineer hired by Bushnell and Dabney to create Pong.
In addition to his wife of 37 years, the former Carolyn Madison of Clearlake, survivors include two daughters from an earlier marriage to Joan Wahrmund, Terri Dabney of Paradise, Calif., and Pamela Dabney of San Mateo, Calif.