It was thirty years ago today (or thereabouts) Atari launched the 2600 which almost single-handedly transformed the television set from passive to interactive.

Though starting slow in 1977 (thanks to a $200 price point) the cartridge-based console took off like a Wii and eventually sold 40 million. Sure, Atari was largely taking low-tech arcade hits and making them even lower tech for the home--and required considerable imagination to see pixels as tanks or crocodiles--but when playing smash hits like Space Invaders and Asteroids it must have felt like living in the future. Could hover boards be far off?

Well, yeah. Atari may've created an entire industry from scratch but they also made some mind-boggling blunders. While the 2600 was in development, founder Nolan Bushnell rejected a proposal from employees Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to create a personal computer they would later dub “Apple.” Then in 1978, Bushnell, who had earlier sold Atari to Warner, was pushed out by the corporate brass (he 'd subsequently found Chuck E. Cheese).

With Bushnell gone, the free-wheeling, beer-fuelled office fun was no more and the oppressive working conditions led several developers to leave and found the original third-party software firm Activision. Their games, like the still-awesome Pitfall!, turned out to be better than Atari’s. Which was a burn. But the subsequent flood of crappy third-party titles proved even worse. The so-called Great Video Game Crash of 1983, which destroyed Atari and its competitors, was likely caused by the glut of sub-par games.

Of course, Atari was just as guilty. Much blame has been laid at the feet of E.T., a late-1982 game which was rushed to market after weeks of development and was so monumentally awful millions of unsold cartridges were buried in the New Mexico desert.   Oh, and Atari also decided against licensing out Nintendo's Famicom console, which would soon become the indomitable NES. D’oh!

The one-time $2 billion business was bankrupt by '84 and the brand-name passed through many hands until landing at France’s Infogrames. Nolan Bushnell has slammed the current Atari as not being "part of today's gaming world in any meaningful way” and apparently consumers agree. The retro-logo’d company bled almost $140 million over the past two years, laid off staff and just last week Infogrames announced an impending plan for Atari’s future, raising the specter of yet another sale.

So, uh, happy birthday Atari! But maybe you should have stayed an ironic T-shirt design.