Nolan Bushnell is Back in the Game

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."

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.

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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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