Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc., and the Chuck E. Cheese chain. He 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". He has started more than 20 companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging Games. In 2012, he founded an educational software company called Brainrush that uses video game technology in educational software.

He is credited with Bushnell's Law, an aphorism about games that are "easy to learn and difficult to master" being rewarding.

Bushnell was born in 1943 in Clearfield, Utah in a middle-class family who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He attended Davis High School in the nearby town of Kaysville, Utah. Bushnell enrolled at Utah State University in 1961 to study engineering and then later business. In 1964, he transferred to the University of Utah College of Engineering, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

He married his first wife, Paula Rochelle Nielson, in 1966 and had two daughters. In 1969, they moved to California. They divorced in 1975 just prior to Warner Communication's purchase of Atari. Near the end of 1977, he married Nancy Nino, with whom he had six children. He also used his profit from selling Atari to Warner to purchase the former mansion of coffee magnate James Folger in Woodside, California.

Bushnell worked at Lagoon Amusement Park for many years while attending college. He was made manager of the games department two seasons after starting. While working there, he became familiar with arcade electro-mechanical games, watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery while learning how it worked, developing his understanding of how the game business operates. He was also interested in the Midway arcade games, where theme park customers would have to use skill and luck to ultimately achieve the goal and win the prize. He liked the concept of getting people curious about the game and from there getting them to pay the fee in order to play.

While in college, he worked for several employers, including Litton Guidance and Control Systems, Hadley Ltd, and the industrial engineering department at the U of U. For several summers, he built his own advertising company, Campus Company, which produced blotters for four universities and sold advertising space around a calendar of events. He also sold copies of Encyclopedia Americana.

After graduating, Bushnell had moved to California from Utah with the hopes of being hired by Disney, but the company was not in the routine practice of hiring fresh college graduates. Instead, Bushnell got a job as an electrical engineer with Ampex. At Ampex, he met fellow employee Ted Dabney and found they had common interests. Bushnell shared his ideas of creating pizza parlors filled with electronic games with Dabney, and took Dabney to the computing labs at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to show him Spacewar!.

In 1970, Bushnell and Dabney formed Syzygy with the intention of producing a Spacewar! clone known as Computer Space. They made an agreement with Nutting Associates, a maker of coin-op trivia and shooting games, that produced a fiberglass cabinet for the unit that included a coin-slot mechanism.

Computer Space was a commercial failure, though sales exceeded $3 million. Bushnell felt that Nutting Associates had not marketed the game well, and decided that his next game would be licensed to a bigger manufacturer. Bushnell also knew that the next game they developed would need to be simpler and not require users to read instructions on the cabinet, since their target audience would likely be drunken bar patrons.

In 1981, Bushnell created the TimberTech Computer Camp in Scotts Valley, California.

In 1982, Bushnell commissioned Charley, a 67-foot racing yacht designed by Ron Holland. Charley went on to win Line honours in the 1983 TransPacific Yacht Race.

In 1983, Bushnell introduced the first "Androbot" TOPO. It was shown at the First Annual Consumer Robotics Show in Albuquerque, NM.

In 1984, Bushnell purchased the arcade game company Videa and renamed it Sente Games. Among the games developed by the company before it closed in 1987 included the hockey video game Hat Trick.

In 1991, Bushnell endorsed the Commodore International CDTV, a CD-ROM-based version of the Amiga 500 computer repackaged for the consumer electronics market.

Bushnell was featured in the documentary film Something Ventured about venture capital development, as well as Atari: Game Over, which documented the unearthing of the Atari video game burial. He was also featured in animated TV show Code Monkeys in Episode 3 of Season 1. For the 50th anniversary of Atari, Bushnell was interviewed by then-current Atari CEO Wade Rosen for the Atari 50 video game where he discussed his history with the company and its relevance in the modern era.

Bushnell is considered to be the "father of electronic gaming" due to his contributions in establishing the arcade game market and creation of Atari. There had been debate between whether Bushnell or Ralph H. Baer, who is credited with creating the first home video game console, should be considered the father of video games, which had led to some bad blood between the two inventors. However, the industry recognized that Baer should be considered the father of home video gaming, while Bushnell is credited with innovating the arcade game.

At the British Academy Video Games Awards on March 10, 2009, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded the Academy Fellowship to Bushnell in recognition of his outstanding achievement as a founding father of the video games industry.

Since 2008, there has been interest to a biographical film about Bushnell's life. While Bushnell had been approached by others to make such a film and turned these offers down, he accepted an offer made by Paramount Pictures in June 2008 with a script by Craig Sherman and Brian Hecker, with Leonardo DiCaprio envisioned to star as Bushnell. While news of the film was quiet over the next ten years, in March 2018, film financing company Vision Tree was working to start an initial coin offering for cryptocurrency to raise up to US$40 million for the film, which was set to be produced by DiCaprio's studio Appian Way Productions, Vision Tree, and Avery Productions.