Nolan Bushnell founded Atari, employed Steve Jobs, built a bunch of robots, and pretty much invented the whole cocky-young-entrepreneurial-genius pose. He's also taken some knocks. But the question you always want to ask Nolan Bushnell is, What's next?
There's a substantial community of true believers -- many of them technology entrepreneurs in their 60s, many with beards -- who contend that sometime within the next few decades, death will cease to be an inevitability. Perhaps this comes from having read a great deal of science fiction. Perhaps it is a natural response of those faced with mortality. Or perhaps, having seen the dramatic changes of the past few decades -- remember, these are people who helped invent the personal computer, genomics, and the Internet -- they have concluded that a cure for death might reasonably follow.
In the gospel of this near religion, salvation is called "the singularity," and its promise lies in the development of advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. In The Singularity Is Near, the entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil argues that, by 2030 or so, we will be able to merge our brains with artificial intelligence and live forever. Kurzweil and a bevy of like-minded proponents -- Google is a co-sponsor, with NASA, of a new Singularity University -- have banded together to study these developments.
Nolan Bushnell is an aging entrepreneur with a white beard -- and, as one might expect, he is sympathetic to the dreams of singularitarians. He believes that robots, of one kind or another, will be central to our lives within two decades. Ask him to imagine the future, and he will tell you about cell phones implanted in our ears and MP3 players controlled with buttons under our tongues. And, of course, cars will drive themselves. "There are so many benefits," Bushnell says, as if to marvel at the fact that it hasn't happened yet. "Accident rates go to zero. You can get home when you're drunk. Kids can get to school without parents. Gas mileage goes up." He could go on and on.
But, unlike committed believers in the singularity, Bushnell also has deep-seated doubts about the future. He worries that regulations will derail the next generation of inventors, and that venture capitalists -- or "lemming capitalists," as he calls them -- will systematically ignore important ideas in pursuit of short-term returns. Much as he'd like to have his Prius run on autopilot, he doesn't know if it will happen in his lifetime. "It all depends on how big the government will get, how pervasive regulation will be," he says. "Right now, the pace of technological growth is just not fast enough."
It's easy to miss this pessimistic strain when you first meet Bushnell, a big man with a baritone voice and a wry smile that oozes self-confidence. He founded Atari in 1972, when kids in their 20s didn't start big, ambitious companies, and sold it four years later for $28 million. It was Bushnell who gave Steve Jobs his first real job, as an Atari engineer, helping pave the way for Apple Computer and a generation of Silicon Valley companies. Bushnell would go on to start 20 businesses of his own -- including the improbably successful arcade and pizza parlor Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre -- and he's still at it today, running a high-tech restaurant chain called uWink, whose patrons order food and play video games using touchscreen kiosks at their tables. Last year, Paramount announced that it would produce a movie based on his life. Leonardo DiCaprio is set to star.
But Bushnell has seen enough to know how bad things can get, and in his office he keeps a beige android called Topo, a monument to his worst failure. Even in its decrepit state, the 3-foot-tall robot is a remarkable piece of machinery. Its squat, angular body sits on two splayed wheels that look like legs. The robot is surrounded by a clutch of other toys, tools, and memorabilia. There's the talking teddy bear Bushnell took to market in 1985 and a poster for the video game Pong, which he created in 1972. There's a picture of him sailing around the Hawaiian island of Oahu in the Transpacific Yacht Race and a black-and-white reproduction of a 1979 cover of Inc., which features Bushnell and a human-size rat in a bowler hat. (That would be the original Chuck E. Cheese's mascot.) There's a soldering iron and a voltmeter, nods to many days and nights spent tinkering with televisions.
But the centerpiece is Topo. The robot no longer works. In fact, it never really worked. "If a computer crashes, it doesn't break anything," Bushnell observes. "But when one of these went haywire, it was not a pretty thing." Topo cost Bushnell more than $20 million and wiped out most of a massive personal fortune. He went from living in a $6 million mansion in Woodside, California, to a modest house in Los Angeles; from his own Learjet to Southwest Airlines tickets. Worst of all -- because Bushnell never cared that much for money -- it led to a legal battle that caused him to miss the entirety of the dot-com boom. In short, it ruined him.
But Bushnell is OK with that. He keeps Topo with him to remember that business is a struggle and that the struggle is part of what makes it fun. "There's some shitty parts to running a business," he says. "But at the same time, creating stuff is neat."
For as long as he can remember -- for even longer than he's been in love with robots -- Nolan Bushnell has considered himself an entrepreneur. He was born in 1943 in Clearfield, Utah, a small town on the Great Salt Lake. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father owned a 12-employee cement contracting business. He got his first lesson in business at age 10, when he figured out how to replace a broken tube on his parents' television set. Impressed, they let him go door-to-door showing off his TV-repair skills to the neighbors. At the time, a TV set cost more than a month's salary for most families and wasn't the kind of thing that was typically entrusted to a child. So Nolan set his price for a service call absurdly low -- just 50 cents to open up a TV, compared with the regular price of $5 -- and, like any mechanic worth his salt, made his margin on parts. "I would mark the hell out of the tubes," he says. "I could make 15 bucks in an hour."
