Atari

Nolan Bushnell founded Atari and created the video game industry. Pong. The Atari 2600. Space Invaders. Asteroids. For a few years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Atari was the fastest-growing company in American history, going from zero to $2 billion in revenue in under a decade.

The crash of 1983 killed it. Atari flooded the market with low-quality games, most infamously 'E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,' which was developed in five weeks and was so bad that millions of unsold cartridges were famously buried in a New Mexico landfill. Consumer confidence in video games evaporated. Atari's revenue dropped 84% in a single year.

What followed was a decades-long game of corporate musical chairs. Warner sold Atari's consumer division to Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore). The brand passed through Hasbro, Infogrames, and various holding companies. The current entity calling itself Atari has been through bankruptcy and multiple identity changes. It shares a name with Bushnell's company but nothing else.