Newsmaker: The return of King Pong

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 parlors. 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 Computer systems. Androbot, his 1980s effort to popularize 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 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?
Bushnell: 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

"I feel in some way that I didn't invent the video game--I commercialized it."

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 commercialized 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?
Bushnell: Magnavox didn't invent the digital video game. They had an analog game. A lot of people don't realize that back in those days, there was a big fight over which would be bigger, the digital computer or the analog computer. They did an excellent job of creating a game using analog 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?
Bushnell: 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

"We were known as a party place, but the important thing is that parties didn't happen unless quotas were made."

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 realize you had a real phenomenon going with Atari?
Bushnell: It was a gradual process. The first indication was when we collected the money out of the first (arcade) "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.

But were you thinking, "Now we'll put one of these in every home?"
Bushnell: Not really. It was a situation where the technology was so expensive at that time, and not very reliable. I felt that in the home, you needed to have something much more reliable and at a significantly lower cost. We started out in the arcade business, and that worked fine. The next epiphany, if you would, was when we figured out we could put Pong on a single LSI chip...All of a sudden, we knew we could put one in every home. All of a sudden, we went from a very successful coin-op business to a potential consumer business.

Then the microprocessor got strong enough. Remember, the first games were not computers at all; they were really digital signal generators, if you will. You couldn't run a program fast enough

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[alskiontheweb]

Thanks!

...I must say I greatly enjoyed all of the Atari games. I grew up on the 2600. I bought Atari Anthology for my XBox and my kids love Outlaw and Bowling. Goes to show you, the games that are timeless are the games that are fun not necessarily the most artistic.

[tdi1]

why the suits?

love the interview. Great insights. As an early purchaser of an Atari 800, I've always been a fan.

One question - on the uWinks website, Careers page, if Nolan created the jeans and t-shirt work ethic, then why are the folks in the picture models in suits and ties?! That picture would have scacred me away when I was an active programmer as it looks like a typical, glitzy, marketing driven company. Definitely not like a 'fun place to work'.

[sadchild]

great quote for nolan!!

i already have this quote as my desktop wallpaper here at the office. very well-said.

"I believe you can either treat employees as equals, as adults, in which you treat everybody with equal dignity. Or you can have a monarchy, where there are the executives and there are the serfs. Monarchies work, but in today's world, where people are highly educated, highly capable and highly mobile, I think treating them like adults is a better way."

and i recently acquired an atari 2600 when a relative passed away. i still love adventure, warlords and maze craze more than any modern games. maze craze..... i could play that game every day for the rest of my life! someone should put that game on the internet for head-to-head maze craze goodness.