KEE Games

Founded in 1973-09 closed in 1978
Status: dead
Country: USA

0.9

per year

The arcade game market is split into manufacturers, distributors, and operators; manufacturers like Atari sell game machines to distributors—who handle several types of electronic machines—who in turn sell them to the operators of locations. In the early 1970s, distributors bought games on an exclusive basis, meaning that only one distributor in each distribution region would carry products from a give arcade game manufacturer, restricting the manufacturer to only the operators that distributor sold to. Atari, in 1973 just over a year old and largely based on their hit first game Pong, felt that as a smaller manufacturer this setup severely limited their hability to sell arcade games: they could only contract with a limited number of distributors, who would only buy a limited number of games per year.To work around
this, Atari set up a secret subsidiary company in September 1973, Kee Games, which was intended to sell clones of Atari’s games, in effect doubling their potential reach. The first such game by Kee, released in March 1974, was Spike, a clone of Rebound. Kee was headed by Joe Keenan, a long-time friend of Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Keenan managed to hire several defectors from Atari, and began advertising itself as a competitor. In December 1974, the relationship to Atari was discovered by the public. However, Kee’s Tank game had been so successful that the distributors wanted to buy the game even without an exclusivity agreement. At the same time, Atari was having financial and management problems, while Joe Keenan had been very successful managing Kee Games. The two companies merged, with Keenan promoted to president of Atari running the business side of things, and Bushnell focusing on engineering.