Nolan Bushnell is Back in the Game

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.

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.

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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.

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