All this made for a beguiling character study. Bushnell was a young man who swore like a carny -- hell, he was a carny -- and yet, with his trademark pipe and blazer, he looked straight out of a Princeton reunion. (Bushnell picked up that jaunty affectation in college and never got tired of the joke.) He acted as if he didn't care much about business, and yet you couldn't deny his success. "There's the old Hollywood cliché about suits and ponytails," says Hawkins. "It was suddenly OK to have a ponytail in charge of a company." Wozniak, who at the time was helping Steve Jobs start Apple, says much the same: "Nolan touched the spirit of so many who dreamed of the connections between technical skills and entertainment. He inspired much of what followed."
Indeed, it's tempting to draw a psychic line to the great ponytail entrepreneurs of the next 30 years: to Netscape's Marc Andreessen in 1996, barefoot and bethroned on the cover of Time, or to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2005 was handing out business cards that said, "I'm CEO…Bitch." At some point in the late 1970s, entrepreneurship went from being a means of wealth accumulation to being -- at least in a few special cases -- a countercultural art form.
Of course, Bushnell never asserted any of this. What he did say -- over and over again to anyone who would listen -- was that business is a game. In fact, almost any activity for Bushnell is a game, a fact I learned when we nearly ran out of gas on Los Angeles's 101 freeway. We were driving between one of his restaurants and his office, and Bushnell, over the objections of his wife, Nancy, who sat in the back seat, had been trying to see if he could get 500 miles on a full tank in his Prius. About five miles from our destination, the car lurched; Bushnell pulled into the right lane as we crawled on battery power to a gas station. We made it -- barely -- and Bushnell was pleased with himself. "How many miles does your car get, Nancy?" he asked his wife, who responded with a tired smile, as if she had heard the line too many times.
When he's not pushing the limits of his Prius, Bushnell plays chess. At any given time, he is playing a dozen or so games on his iPhone. He plays against his friends, his employees, his kids, and his board members. Every 15 minutes or so throughout the day, he takes out his phone, stares at the screen, fiddles for a second, mutters an obscenity or two, and finally puts it away and picks up wherever he left off. "I used to be good, but I'm really sucking right now," he confides as he analyzes a game against his 26-year-old son, Gavin, who works as an assistant manager at the uWink restaurant in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills.
Despite this obvious love for games, Bushnell is no hard-core gamer -- at least not in the way the term would be understood by contemporary geeks in Atari throwback T-shirts. In the years since he launched the industry, video games have moved from the midway to the home, from the kind of thing you might do on a date to the kind of thing you do in your underwear because you can't get one. The 1990s witnessed the rise of increasingly realistic shooting games like Grand Theft Auto, which encourages players to sleep with prostitutes, assassinate people, and peddle drugs. Bushnell abhors this development and has suggested that Grand Theft Auto is borderline pornographic. "Nolan takes a social approach, as opposed to a techno-fetish approach," says Will Wright, founder of the game company Maxis and designer of the games SimCity and Spore. "I think what he did with Pong was ask what kind of social experience would a video game lead to."
In that light, it's easy to understand how Bushnell could go from something as hip as Atari to something as wacky as Chuck E. Cheese's. Bushnell figured that the games he had been marketing to bars, bowling alleys, and pool halls needed a venue that was cleaner, safer, and more fun. In Chuck E. Cheese's, he imagined a video game company that would control the means of distribution -- in this case, pizza parlors with arcades inside -- just as the old-style movie studios had owned the theaters. Pizza was only the pretext. As far as Bushnell was concerned, he was starting the new Disney.
Of course, Bushnell's vision, which began with a single San Jose pizza parlor opened in 1977 as a subsidiary of Atari, was decidedly different from the goodhearted earnestness of Disney. The company's mechanical mascot, who entertained diners with a sort of cabaret routine, was the eponymous rat, Chuck E. Cheese. He was a large, surly, cigar-smoking smart aleck -- a robotic incarnation of Bushnell himself. What Chuck E. Cheese's offered was a massive arcade where parents could deposit their children and then enjoy some adult time -- that is, if you ignored the robotic dog doing Elvis impersonations and focused instead on the fact that the place served wine and beer.
After taking a look at the odd experiment, Warner did the only sensible thing: It ordered Bushnell to shut it down. "They thought it was the stupidest idea ever," he recalls. Bushnell protested, and Warner sold him control of Chuck E. Cheese's for $500,000. "Everybody believes in innovation until they see it," Bushnell says. "Then they think, 'Oh, no; that'll never work. It's too different."
