Co-founder of Atari Ted Dabney has died at the age of 81. His death was announced on Facebook by renowned photojournalist Herman Leonard who said, “Your legacy will live on a long time!”

In 1971, Dabney founded Syzygy with Nolan Bushnell, which served as Atari’s predecessor before they incorporated the new company the following year, where each cofounder pulled in $250 from their private coffers to form their new ‘startup’. The company then released their most iconic video game, Pong, which was also the Atari’s first ever successful game, setting sales records across the United States.

But things didn’t last well and Dabney left in the 1970s because of differences with his partner Bushnell. The photojournalist Herman Leonard has documented this story in great detail which can be found in Edge Magazine’s 2009 edition.

He was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2017, but declined to treat it according to Eurogamer.

His career has included brief stints at Hewlett-Packard and the tape manufacturer Ampex before him and his partner cofounded Syzygy. Disagreements with Bushnell forced Dabney to find work elsewhere and he began to work for Raytheon, Fujistu and Teledyne before leaving the tech industry for good.

One can argue that Dabney was the forgotten father of video games, because his cofounder Nolan Bushnell became far more famous due to the commercial success of his video games business in the 1970s.

Dabney was born in San Francisco, California in 1937 and studied electronics engineering after enlisting with the US. Marine Corps. He was soon hired by Hewlett-Packard after becoming an engineer. But then he left the company to join Ampex to work on designing military products. It was at Ampex that he met Bushnell. Their first video game was “Computer Space”, a combat arcade machine based which was based on Spacewar!

Their coin operated machine sold more than 1000 units, and their new revenue stream allowed them to incorporate Atari. Pong became an instant success and launched their company name into the limelight, establishing them as the pioneer in video games.

In a statement, setting aside bitter differences, Bushnell went on to say, “Ted was my partner, cofounder, fellow dreamer and friend. I will always cherish the time we spent together. RIP.”

The duo worked on numerous projects together, this includes Pizza Time Theater, Catalyst Technologies, Syzygy Game Company and Teledyne. After leaving the tech industry altogether, Dabney went on to manage a grocery store and then a deli.

An article on Kotaku says that Ted Dabney was the most integral part of the early video games industry, having literally built the hardware on which their industry was built. Now that is something not everyone can boast about, to single handedly build an industry and to leave it at the peak of your career. It’s a legacy on which corporations and billion dollar empires were based on. All of it is owed to the ingenuity and innovation of Ted Dabney, the forgotten father of the video games industry.