Kee Games


Kee Games was an American arcade game manufacturer that released arcade and video games from 1973 to 1978.

History

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 reality, Kee Games was a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari created in response to the pinball and arcade distributors of the time who demanded exclusivity deals. Kee Games released several "clones" of Atari games, allowing Atari to "exclusively" sell games to two distributors at once.
By mid-1974, Atari was having financial and management problems, while Joe Keenan had been very successful managing Kee Games. The two companies merged that September, with Keenan promoted to president of Atari running the business side of things. Atari continued to use the "Kee Games" label to release some of their games until 1978, but from the merger on, the games were clearly labelled "a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari, Inc."

Games