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 try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.
I always try to do something nobody else has done.
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.
Walk to work, even if it's four miles. Ride a bike to work. Drive a different way. On your way there, try to find beauty. You'd be surprised how much more of the neighborhood you can perceive and experience when you're looking for unique spots of beauty.
literally thousands of people have told me over the years that they met their wife or husband playing Pong.
I'm here to pass the baton, so to speak, to some of these new inductees, many of which are guys that I respect in the business as being truly revolutionary.
Sometimes when you hire people who have to pass a Mr. Congeniality test, you end up losing some of the non-conformists who will give you different views and perspectives.
Remember that we can only in our forebrains handle 5-7 items. Our backbrains can handle massive amounts. So when you're given a problem, think about it before you go sleep, and chances are you can solve it by the next morning.
We didn't do a square ball in 'Pong' because we thought it was cool. We did it because that was all we could do.
The game business reinvents itself every five years.
The big problem that UWink had was we were essentially building tablets because they hadn't been invented yet. That drove up the cost a lot.
The thing we don't want to do is overstate the benefits, but there is all kinds of proof that exercise, both physical and mental, increases brain activity.
Learning ballroom dancing is great for your brain. But it only works for three to six months. After that, you've got all the benefit you can get, and so you have to move on to yoga, and then Tai Chi, and then bridge, always keeping on the steep part of the learning curve.
I never, ever, saw the evil Steve Jobs. He was always the most well-mannered and respectful guy I knew. And we got to be pretty good friends. He didn't suffer fools gladly. I guess he didn't think I was a fool.