Guy who invented atari

And you can see it perhaps most prominently on his resume, whose most notable entries include the founding of Atari, the company that gave birth to the videogame market; the launching of Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater, the kid-friendly restaurant chain that created a new type of venue for arcade games; and his current venture, uWink, a networked series of videogames connected to the Internet. Bushnell refers to games as "legal addictions" and says that is what makes them such good businesses.

Like the arcade junkie who can't go home without putting one more quarter in the slot, Bushnell is a habitual entrepreneur, with more than 20 startups to his credit over the past three decades. But playing the marketplace is trickier than playing, say, Space Invaders. And the thing about games, of course, is that there's always a winner and a loser, and sometimes it's hard to know which column to put Bushnell in. While Bushnell is justly revered in video-geek circles, and his early successes were impressive in both vision and scope the unlikely juxtaposition of Atari and Chuck E.

Cheese made him the first and probably the last person to win major honors from both the Computer Museum of America and Restaurant News magazine , coming up with an encore has proved trickier. Several of his subsequent endeavors have gone nowhere, and even the successful ones haven't approached the cultural or financial impact of his early ventures. Moreover, for a guy who helped anticipate and create the "entertainment economy," Bushnell has had a curiously difficult time seeing his concepts through to their full potential.

The best examples of that can be found during the early s, when the videogame market crashed. Bushnell was no longer with Atari at that point, having sold the company to Warner Communications now part of AOL Time Warner, parent of FSB's publisher and then getting ousted after repeated squabbling with Warner management.

Although he didn't go down with that particular ship, he still feels he's been unfairly saddled with the baggage of the brand's eventual collapse. But during that period Bushnell was still running Chuck E. Cheese, which was forced into bankruptcy by, among other things, the arcade downturn.

Fast-forward to Nintendo rejuvenates the videogame industry, leading a surge that continues today with Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox. Cheese was an early practitioner--and went global with it by tailoring it for adults.

As for old Chuckie, it still flourishes. Why does this prototypical self-starter have trouble finishing the job? The most obvious place to look would be Bushnell's management style. To his credit, he's never had trouble surrounding himself with talented people. Indeed, his staff at Atari included two young Steves named Jobs and Wozniak whose subsequent metamorphosis into business rock stars only throws Bushnell's failure to do that into higher relief.

And unlike so many control-freak entrepreneurs who insist on micromanaging every last detail of their business, Bushnell prides himself on being an effective delegator. In fact, he says, "Atari grew very, very well because as we'd get one market segment working like a Swiss watch, I'd delegate it off and focus my energies on the next thing. If anything, Bushnell may be guilty of having delegated too much--he concedes that he didn't keep close enough tabs on Chuck E.

Cheese, mainly because he had no particular interest in being a restaurateur. He longs to revive the amorphous early days of videogames when, he says, 40 percent of the "coin drop" for Pong came from women and no one felt intimidated to give it a try. Back then, he saw electronic gaming as a force for social good, a way for people to get to know one another - a function that has fallen away in the intervening decades.

Meanwhile, Bushnell has become a self-styled crusader against what he views as the moral turpitude of contemporary gaming. For Bushnell, the violence that pervades the media is equally corrosive. The big idea behind uWink Media Bistros is to counter all these negative trends at once.

Bushnell hopes to create a social oasis where customers leave their anxieties at the door and join together in a childlike spirit of play. The games will be simple and wholesome, giving customers an easy way to meet and interact, thereby diminishing the anomie of insulated modern existence.

And behind the scenes, keeping everyone happy, will be Nolan Bushnell. Before you pigeonhole Bushnell in the crowded category of aging curmudgeons who rail about "kids these days and their … " fill in the blank: videogames, body piercings, baggy pants , consider that his disillusionment comes from hard-won experience. He has been thinking about the nature of games and their impact on society for four decades. It began at Lagoon Amusement Park, north of Salt Lake City, where he worked summers while pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Utah.

As a barker on the midway, he ran the booth where players try to win a plush bear by throwing a baseball at a pyramid of three milk bottles. He was a natural, and before long he was managing the midway. The two milk bottles at the bottom of the pyramid were weighted, he notes, making them nearly impossible to topple.

How could rigged games be good games? Because of the social energy that swirled around them. Bushnell remembers the young couples and families and, especially, the groups of single young men and women looking to meet and using the games as a pretext. He also remembers the joy he took as barker - being quick with the joke, getting people to "step right up and give it a try," making sure everyone had fun. He particularly liked using the games to control social interactions among the players.

When a high school football star stepped up to impress the head cheerleader, Bushnell would stack the bottles in their usual sturdy pyramid. That was my MBA. Bushnell took that training to Silicon Valley in As a student, he had played computer games on the university mainframe - technology, he realized, that would revolutionize coin-op midway attractions.

Under the Chuck E. Cheese monicker, the franchise quickly grew to more than restaurants. Using his stock in Atari and Chuck E. He was 39 years old, smart, rich - and primed for a long, hard fall. That came in The videogame industry, awash in copycat titles, crashed in a tide of bankruptcies.

Atari bled half a billion dollars, and Chuck E. To such an extent that when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak approached him, wanting Atari to make and sell what would be their first Apple computer, he turned their proposal down. But Bushnell constantly clashed with the new management, and was forced off the board in As he walked away from the industry he effectively founded — devoting his energies to the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain — Atari proceeded to dominate the fledgling games industry.

Until it crashed, spectacularly, in SB: Did you know that Pong and then the would be such a huge success, and would effectively spawn what is now the games industry in the process?

NB: You know, it's interesting. I saw it as being a multi-million-dollar business. I didn't see it as being quite as explosive a success as it turned out to be. You know, when you're building something, you know all of the trade-offs, and I always felt that the was — in that gaming space — kind of a stepping-stone, and that maybe it would be on the market for two or three years. After I sold the company to Warner, I said: "Well, we've got to get started on the next version.

I think that one of the big mistakes that happened was that the was pushed too hard, too far, and there wasn't a gentle transition to the newer technology. SB: Atari had a golden period when it dominated the industry, then everything went wrong in the early to-mid s, with things like the notorious ET landfill fiasco. How involved with the company were you then, and how bad a period was that for you? NB: I left the company in , and I really had massive, massive disagreements with how Warner was running the company.

I really saw that they were going to totally screw it up. The only thing that I was wrong about is that it took them two years longer than I thought it would. SB: What are your favourite games from your time at Atari? There was another game called Tempest that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time. SB: What's your biggest regret?

And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years. So I did Chuck E. Cheese and things in automobile navigation. It's made for a very interesting life, but I feel I had some core skill-sets in the games business that I sort of allowed to lie fallow.

SB: Can you tell us about what happened when Jobs and Wozniak approached, wanting you to turn their computer designs into a product, and you turned them down? NB: You've got to understand that Atari was very underfunded all the way along — the venture-capital community and financial community didn't get the fact that games were a business. We were using every bit of capital that we had just to keep up with the growth.

We were internally funded and growing as fast we could, limited by our capital. So, to take on anything else that would alienate any of that capital just didn't make sense at the time. I recognised that we were going to be able to — at some point in time — get into the computer business, which we ultimately did once we had access to Warner's capital.

We had some really powerful technology — Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI. SB: Were you impressed by Jobs and Wozniak at the time?

NB: The two Steves were young and excited, but I was not convinced that they were ready for the bruising business world. I introduced them to Don Valentine, who brought in Mike Markala, who provided the business skills for their first years in business. I think much of their early success was because of Mike.

Jobs has grown into a truly great CEO — if it would have happened anyway is anyone's guess. A debate constantly rages in the games world, about whether today's flashy, complex 3D games are actually any better than the blocky-looking but supremely playable efforts introduced in the early days and particularly on the Atari Many maintain that games like Pong, Space Invaders, Breakout, Asteroids, Missile Command, Joust and so on possessed a purity that has been lost on the 21st century, and they point to the enduring popularity of retro games on, for example, the Xbox Live Arcade and mobile phones.

We sounded out Bushnell's views on this debate, and encouraged him to nominate some seminal efforts that had an enduring impact on the evolution of games.

SB: Now that games have become 3D and often complex, are there any out there that float your boat? NB: I'm a big believer in the Wii. I love the physicality of the Wii controller, and how you can get the feeling of throwing a bowling ball or swinging a golf club. Those are the kinds of games I really like. I would be playing first-person shooters with my kid, except that those are games in which you have to have such fast circuits. My kids just whack me, so it's no fun — I hate to lose.

I like games where you can use stealth and guile. As you get older, it's like the difference between playing squash and racketball. Squash is an older man's game, because if you're stealthy and wily, you can beat a better-co-ordinated and stronger, younger person. SB: How do modern games stack up against games like Breakout? There's still a great love of retro games, which many feel have a purity and simplicity that has been lost.

Where do you stand on that argument?