Nolan Bushnell
Nolan Bushnell
Nolan Kay Bushnellis an American engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters chain. Bushnell has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship and the Nations Restaurant News “Innovator of the Year” award, and was named one of Newsweek's "50 Men Who Changed America." Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is one of the founding fathers of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth5 February 1943
CityClearfield, UT
CountryUnited States of America
I'd love to design a school.
I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.
I've always been a tech-head.
I've always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.
I think 'Something Ventured' is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way.
My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.
In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.
I always loved both 'Breakout' and 'Asteroids' - I thought they were really good games. 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.
I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well.
I've been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants, communications systems, touch screens, and now I'm back in games. I like to say I have five-year A.D.D.
Video games in some ways are too powerful, they have too much resonance with kids. And it's very easy to overdose on video games and to let the outside world go by.
In 1980, Atari was bringing in around two billion dollars in revenue and Chuck E. Cheese's some five hundred million. I still didn't feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple - although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.
Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you're not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you're not going to make progress.
The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.