Founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney after their stints at Nutting Associates and Bally Manufacturing, the duo quickly hired their first engineer Al Alcorn who would create Atari's first game, "Pong", in late 1972. Pong would go on to become the first commercially successful video game ever made and create a frenzy around digital games, bringing many other larger companies into the industry and spurring on the "Pong-Clone Era" of video games. Atari's first few years after Pong mainly revolved around increasing production and creating a fake competitor company, "Kee Games", led by Joe Keenan to help them get around exclusivity clauses with arcade distributors. Kee games would actually start doing better than Atari itself, causing the two companies to merge by the end of 1974, naming Joe Keenan the new President of Atari.