Nolan Bushnell is Back in the Game

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."

Bushnell talks about these childhood exploits excitedly and without irony, as if hawking overpriced cathode-ray tubes before high school and, in his late teens, running games at an amusement park outside Salt Lake City were his life's work. He can still rattle off the economics of the TV-repair business or tell you the midway's revenue per customer. (Under his management, it was $1.80, which, he says, was the highest in the country at the time.) In college, he guessed weights and ran knock-down-the-milk-bottles games, even as he was learning how to program million-dollar mainframes at the University of Utah. "I could have stayed in the amusement park business after I graduated college," Bushnell says, "but I knew I could go back anytime."

He never really left. In 1970, after a brief stint at a Silicon Valley electronics company, Bushnell struck out on his own with a plan to make a better arcade. "The idea for Atari came to me while I was at college, playing math games on the University of Utah's huge general-purpose computer," he wrote in the 1979 Inc. cover story. "If I could just put a coin slot on this machine, I thought, I'd have a business. …But at $4 million apiece, the computers were too costly." When he started seeing advertisements for minicomputers that cost just a few thousand dollars each, he quit his job and got to work.

This story makes sense in retrospect, but at the time Bushnell's success hardly seemed certain. Video games were popular among computer geeks on college campuses and in corporate research parks, but they were unknown to most everyone else. "Nolan started when there was nothing to suggest that television-based arcade games could amount to an entire industry," says Steve Wozniak, the co-founder, with Steve Jobs, of Apple Computer. Bushnell's first arcade game was based on an MIT spaceship simulation that allowed two players to shoot missiles at each other. He named it Computer Space and licensed it to Nutting Associates, an arcade company in Mountain View, California. It was the first commercial video game.

Computer Space sold reasonably well -- Bushnell was paid $150,000 in royalties in 1971 -- but not as well as he had hoped. "It should have been three or four times that," Bushnell says. From this, he concluded two things. The first was that video games needed to be simpler. Controlling a spaceship's thrust and rotation proved too complicated for a kid at a bowling alley or a half-drunk guy at a pool hall. The second lesson was that he was perfectly qualified to start a company himself. "I think that one of the reasons Silicon Valley creates so many entrepreneurs is, you work next to someone who has started a company and you say to yourself, 'That guy has been successful and he's a dumb shit,' " Bushnell says. "I saw these guys at Nutting who were not smart folks, and yet they had this successful company. So I said to myself, 'I couldn't possibly screw up more than them.' "

He launched Atari -- the company name referred to a move in the Japanese board game Go -- with a friend and his Computer Space earnings. He distributed pinball machines to pay for the development costs of his first game, Pong. He designed Pong not the way a computer scientist would have built a game but like a hustler on the midway. It was simple -- just a few lines on a dark background and a single-sentence rule book -- and it was instantly understandable to anyone over the age of 3. Bushnell sold the game to arcade distributors and in a home edition at Sears stores.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT 

Read more:

Max Chafkin

Senior writer Max Chafkin has profiled companies such as Yelp, Zappos, Twitter, Threadless, and Tesla for the magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Sign-up for our Small Business Success Newsletter

Email Address: