Management Toolkit

The lessons of experience

David Becker CNET News

Published: 16 Mar 2005 12:40 GMT

Don't tell Nolan Bushnell there are no second acts in American life. Or third or fourth, for that matter.

The entrepreneur and Silicon Valley pioneer pretty much created the video game industry with the founding of Atari in the 1970s. He made another bundle in the 1980s by launching the Chuck E. Cheese's chain of pizza restaurants. He jump-started the automobile navigation system industry with the company that eventually became Etak.

Bushnell also had some failures along the way. His crack at the PC market, the Atari 800, was steamrolled by former Atari employees Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and their early Apple systems. Androbot, his 1980s effort to popularise household robots, never got a product to market.

But Bushnell figures he's got at least one more breakthrough left in him. The entrepreneur started uWink, a somewhat mysterious entertainment technology venture, a few years ago and pledges to reveal a breakthrough technology soon that will build on many of his previous innovations.

Bushnell reviewed the highs and lows of his past with ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com while in San Francisco recently for his induction into the Walk of Game, a new shrine of video game history.

You started playing computer games when you were working on mainframes in the 1960s. What made you think this could be some type of consumer technology?
The link was that I was working in an amusement park at the time. I was pursuing an engineering degree in the winter and working in the game department at a regional amusement park in Utah in the summer. What that gave me was knowledge of how the financial side of the arcade business worked. And it was very easy to see that what I was playing on the mainframes, if I could bring it to the cost structure of an amusement park, that it would work.

I feel in some way that I didn't invent the video game — I commercialised it. The real digital video game was invented by a few guys who programmed PDP-1s at MIT. The very first time a video screen was connected to a computer, one of the first things the engineers thought of was playing a game on it.

The Magnavox Odyssey got to market a wee bit before Atari. What gave you the edge?
Magnavox didn't invent the digital video game. They had an analogue game. A lot of people don't realise that back in those days, there was a big fight over which would be bigger, the digital computer or the analogue computer. They did an excellent job of creating a game using analogue circuitry, but it just wasn't fun.

The classic Atari games still show up on phones and other gadgets. Have you been surprised at how durable those games have been?
Actually not. I think that at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy. In some ways, the old games are a little bit purer because they completely focused on those elements instead of production values.

If you have a tournament chess player, they will only play with one kind of chess set. They don't want pieces made of glass or intricately carved things. All those production values that make very pretty chess sets actually make the game harder to play. In some ways, if you focus on production values and you short-change rules and structure, you end up with a poorer game than something that's really simple.

When did you start to realise you had a real phenomenon going with Atari?
It was a gradual process. The first indication was when we collected the money out of the first Pong game, and there was so much in there it had jammed the coin mechanism. At that point in time, I knew I had a successful business.