From 1979 through 1984, Chuck E. Cheese's grew explosively -- if not always profitably. The company landed twice on the Inc. 100 list of the fastest-growing public companies. It opened several hundred locations across the country. In 1983, Bushnell began preparing for a confrontation with Atari: He launched a video game division called Sente -- the only move in Go that beats an atari -- and promised that he would once again be the king of games. He launched a start-up incubator called Catalyst Technologies. He bought himself an even bigger sailboat -- he piloted it to a fourth-place finish in the Transpacific Yacht Race in 1983 -- and jetted among his homes in Woodside, Aspen, and Paris. He was on top of the world.
From such heights, a fall of some kind must have been inevitable. But it's still hard not to be amazed when you visit Nolan Bushnell today and discover this 66-year-old entrepreneurial legend in such modest circumstances, working in a small office in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles as he tries to turn around his struggling restaurant chain.
Until I visited, Bushnell had never taken a reporter to his company's headquarters, probably with good reason. UWink occupies two little suites in a dun-colored cinder-block edifice surrounded by check-cashing stores and fast-food spots. There's no receptionist or even a lobby to greet visitors -- just a cluttered workshop full of computer equipment. Because Bushnell typically meets with visitors at one of the company's three restaurants, he's never bothered to keep things presentable. "It's about as low class as you can get," Bushnell says. "But who cares? It's cheap, and my ego doesn't need it. I don't think we'd sell one more hamburger if we were on the fifth floor of some office tower."
Indeed, Bushnell seems to take a certain pleasure in his comparative poverty, bragging about his company's reliance on family labor -- four of his eight children and his wife work at uWink. "I'm a big believer in nepotism," he says, before introducing his own blue-collar definition of the concept: "You tell your kids they have to come work, you treat them like shit, and you don't pay them very much because it's good for the family." As to the trappings of wealth, he doesn't miss them either. "There are a lot of things about having money that are perceived to be cool but that aren't," he says. "Maybe if you're a CEO jerk who likes going coast to coast by himself in a G4, then that's fine. But that's not me. And it never will be."
Of course, Bushnell could have protected his money and his reputation. He could have written books, or become a VC, or hit the lecture circuit. He could have focused exclusively on managing Chuck E. Cheese's and become, like so many great founders who start their careers as builders and end them as administrators, a perfectly adequate CEO. In other words, he could have stopped being an entrepreneur.
Instead, he doubled down, launching a spate of new companies, each of which blended inventiveness with a kind of freethinking that at times seemed close to insanity. There was Etak, which made the first navigation system for cars, a precursor to modern GPS navigation; it was sold to Rupert Murdoch for $50 million in 1989. There was Axlon, which created a talking plush toy called A.G. Bear and sold $15 million worth of them in 1985. Not that these businesses didn't produce clunkers, too. There was, for example, Tech Force, a line of toy robots that were to be controlled by sound waves coming from a television show.
But the craziest idea by far was the quixotic plan to bring robots into people's homes. Bushnell founded Androbot in 1982 with the promise that for a few thousand dollars, he would be able to sell you a robotic companion. It would talk to you, play hide-and-seek with your kids, watch for burglars, maybe grab you a beer out of a specially designed Androbot cooler. He financed the company out of his own pocket, launched it at the 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and told the world that an IPO was imminent.
Just six months later, the market for technology stocks crashed, and Bushnell's underwriter, Merrill Lynch, canceled the Androbot offering. That left Bushnell on the hook for roughly $5 million in loans, taken out against his Chuck E. Cheese's stock. Meanwhile, the pizza chain, which had been losing money in its fervor to expand, found itself unable to raise additional capital. Bushnell resigned as CEO in the fall, and within a year, Chuck E. Cheese's would be bankrupt and Bushnell's stock would be worthless. Chuck E. Cheese's emerged intact -- today it is an $800 million company with 500 locations -- but Bushnell's finances did not. He had to keep borrowing to keep Androbot alive, and by the time it was all over in 1985, he owed Merrill Lynch $23 million, which he would spend the next decade trying to pay back.
Bushnell's earnings from Etak and Axlon got him most of the way out of debt, but the legal wrangling continued. Merrill sued Bushnell in 1995 over a $500,000 promissory note, just as he was attempting another company, a futuristic arcade called E2000. He countersued, arguing that Merrill had been partly to blame for the Androbot debacle, but the E2000 investors pulled their money out anyway. Suddenly, the man who had been starting companies his whole life couldn't get one off the ground. "I totally missed the dot-com bubble," he says. "Do you really think that I wouldn't have had a few dot-com companies?" He breaks into a fierce grin -- the only time I have seen Bushnell look genuinely bitter.
