Nolan Bushnell

Encyclopedia : N : NO : NOL : Nolan Bushnell

Nolan K. Bushnell (born February 5 1943 in Clearfield, Utah) is an electrical engineer and entrepreneur from the United States who founded both Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters chain. He is widely recognized as the father of the video game industry.

Bushnell graduated from the University of Utah electrical engineering program in 1968, and was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. Bushnell was one of many computer science students of the 1960s who played the now-famous Spacewar! game on DEC mainframe computers. In 1971, Bushnell and colleague Ted Dabney formed Syzygy Company and created the Spacewar clone Computer Space. The “counter slip” state machine technology which drove Computer Space was later patented and served as the core technology for all video games except for the analog Odyssey by Magnavox until 1977 when microprocessors became the technology of choice. Computer Space was built into a self-contained cabinet manufactured and distributed by Nutting Associates. Computer Space proved to be too far ahead of its time and was a commercial failure.

Though Computer Space enjoyed over $3 million in sales Bushnell felt that the poor marketing of Nutting left significant sales on the table and decided that his next game would be licensed to a bigger manufacturer. In 1972, he and Dabney incorporated their company, rented their first office on Scott Blvd in Sunnyvale, CA and changed the name to Atari. They then contracted with Bally Manufacturing to create a driving game. To handle the additional work they hired their first employee Al Alcorn. Nolan had recently visited a Odyssey showing and thought that fixing the game play of the Magnavox tennis game would be a simple training project never thinking that it would be commercialized. The project turned out to create the PONG video game, Bushnell had it installed at a bar in Grass Valley, California and a tavern in Sunnyvale, California called Andy Capp's (which has since become Rooster T. Feathers). Pong proved to be popular but imitators helped keep Atari from dominating the fledgling coin-operated video game market at that time.

Bushnell later bought out Dabney. In 1974, Bushnell and Atari decided to develop a home version of PONG. Thanks to a marketing and distribution agreement with Sears, PONG sales soared by 1975. In 1977, Atari introduced the Atari 2600 VCS (Video Computer System), which revolutionized the home video game market, and began a new era in video game consoles. Demand for the unit was so great that Atari executives manned the production lines to help with the assembly and packaging during that first Christmas after its release. In 1976, Atari employee Steve Jobs offered to Bushnell a computer design that he and friend Steve Wozniak had created, but Atari was already in no financial position to act upon it; the same year, Warner Communications (now Time Warner) bought Atari, and Bushnell was forced out of the company in November of 1978 after a dispute with Warner over the future direction of the company, notably on their closed software strategy (later changed) for the home computer division.

While still at Atari in 1977, he had purchased Pizza Time Theaters back from Warner Communications (as Pizza Time was created by Bushnell and was originally developed as distribution channel for Atari Games while Bushnell as at Atari ), a place where kids could go and eat pizza and play video games. The Pizza Time / Chuck E. Cheese's Theaters also had animatronic animals that played music as entertainment (Bushnell had always wanted to work for Walt Disney, but was continually turned down for employment when he was first starting out after graduation - Chuck E. Cheese's was his homage to Disney and the technology developed there). In 1981 Bushnell turned day to day Chuck E Cheese’s operational responsibilities to a newly hired restaurant executive and focused on Catalyst Technologies. In 1983 Chuck E. Cheese’s started to lose money and Bushnell believed that the company had gone way off course and attempted to oust the President. He resigned when his attempt was rebuffed by the Board of Directors. Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theaters (now named after its famous mouse mascot) entered bankruptcy in the fall of 1984. Chuck E. Cheese's emerged from bankruptcy and it survives today as a successful entertainment and restaurant chain with more than 480 restaurants.

In addition to his animatronic entertainment at Chuck E. Cheese's, Bushnell was also involved in the 1982 founding of Androbot, Inc, a company that introduced personal robots for entertainment purposes. However, the company stopped production in 1984. Androbot was one of several companies in Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital Group, one of the first incubators. Other companies in the group included Etak, Cumma, Axlon and more. Axlon launched many consumer and consumer electronic products successfully, most notably AG Bear, a bear that mumbled/echoed a child's words back to him/her. Axlon was largely sold to Hasbro. ETAK, was the first company to digitize the maps of the world, ultimately providing the back bone for google maps, mapquest.com, and other navigation systems. Etak was sold to Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s.

In 1984, Bushnell once again entered the video game business, when he founded Sente Games. (Sente is the Japanese term for the initiative or control in Go, Bushnell's favorite game). Bally/Midway agreed to be Sente's distributor; the list of published Sente titles includes the popular one-on-one hockey game, Hat Trick (1984).

In 1988, Bushnell endorsed Atari (then a separate entity from Atari Games, headed by Jack Tramiel and family) while managing the development of two new games for the Atari VCS, most likely as part of a marketing attempt to revive sluggish Atari sales. In 1988 and 1989, Bushnell operated Bots, Inc., which developed a system of autonomous pizza delivery robots for Little Caesar's Pizza. In 1991, Bushnell endorsed the Commodore CDTV. In 2005, Bushnell served as a judge on the USA Network reality series Made In the USA.

Bushnell has started over 20 companies (his most recent being [uWink], uWink which is a new interactive entertainment restaurant where you can order your food and drink via touch screens at the table. Guests can also enjoy games, movie trailers and video shorts. uWink is scheduled to open summer 2006.

Bushnell has numerous patents and has received a great deal of recognition, included being inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, receiving the Nations Restaurant News “Innovator Of The Year” award, and being named one of Newsweek's "50 Men That Changed America".

References

Zap: the Rise and Fall of Atari, by Scott Coen (1984) ISBN 0738868833
Gaming 101: A Contemporary History of PC and Video Games, by George Jones (2005) ISBN 1556220804
The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon--The story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, by Steven L. Kent (2001) ISBN 0761536434
High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, by Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson (2003) ISBN 0072231726

External links

[The Dot Eaters entry] on Bushnell and Atari
[An interview] with Bushnell

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.