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.
By 1976, Atari was booking $40 million a year in sales, and its consumer business was exploding. Bushnell wanted to take the company public to finance the production of a new home gaming system, but then, worried that investors might not know what to make of a company like Atari, he accepted a $28 million acquisition offer from Warner Communications. Though an IPO surely would have made him richer -- and though Bushnell has spent no small amount of time questioning his decision since -- the $14 million he took home for four years' work seemed like plenty. Video games had arrived, and the father of video games had become a hero to a burgeoning group of ambitious tech entrepreneurs.
As with many people who have lived their lives in the public eye, it is hard to separate Nolan Bushnell from the story he has fashioned for himself, the one about the rebellious geek who makes good. This is especially difficult in Bushnell's case, because his personal mythology has become something of a cliché. We are no longer surprised when we meet wildly successful entrepreneurs who are young, technically savvy, and cocky. Yet it wasn't always that way.
In 1976, the very idea of a fast-growing start-up -- forget the notion of a 33-year-old, pipe-smoking, whip-smart playboy of a founder -- was somewhat novel. "The thinking was that a growth company shouldn't be trying to grow by any more than 20 percent a year," says Trip Hawkins, who founded the video game giant Electronic Arts and who now runs the game company Digital Chocolate. When he read about Bushnell's success while in Stanford's M.B.A. program, Hawkins realized his own entrepreneurial dream was possible. "Here was this young guy who'd had an amazing success and had a big-ticket sale to a big, legitimate public company," Hawkins recalls. "Nolan's the guy who blazed the trail for me, proving that you could be successful and create a lot of value quickly. He was my John the Baptist."
What admirers like Hawkins couldn't see was Bushnell's trepidation as he built Atari. "I felt absolutely alone," Bushnell recalls. "Everybody I talked to would say, 'You've got to replace yourself, you've got to find somebody with experience." He hired and fired three successive presidents. "I said to myself, 'I may be fucking things up, but not as badly as these guys are." To compensate for his lack of experience, he projected boundless self-confidence and spent money wildly. A 1977 story in Time titled "The Hot New Rich" described Bushnell's yacht -- named Pong -- his Mercedes, his 15-acre estate, his ski cabin, and his sexual gusto. "I have phone numbers in a lot of cities," he bragged to the reporter.
