Nolan Bushnell is Back in the Game

For Bushnell, robots also represent the ultimate entrepreneurial challenge. "The world is stupid in the short term and smart in the long term," Bushnell often says, and he seems to understand entrepreneurs as the mediators of this disconnect, the people who must drag the world from stupid to smart. Whether he wants to invent a new kind of restaurant or integrate robots into human society, his first step is always to close his eyes and imagine the world as it might be. "I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are," he says. Once he has found a place where his vision of the future differs from the prevailing wisdom, he will start a company.

Of course, Bushnell has been wrong about the future more times than he has been right. UWink is in its third iteration after two brushes with death. After 9/11, Bushnell lost $6 million worth of business and had to lay off his entire staff, as all the orders for the company's video game kiosks disappeared. The company had another near failure at the end of last year, when its stock price fell almost to zero and its three restaurants began losing money. When I visited the uWink restaurant in Woodland Hills at lunchtime on a Wednesday in early January, the place was eerily quiet, with only a handful of diners tapping away at their little screens.

And yet, when Bushnell shows up, wearing blue jeans and puffing his pipe, he is downright jolly -- collapsing economy be damned. In between fragrant rips of smoke and bites of a pepperoni pizza, he explains that, although the lunch crowds have abandoned uWink, his restaurants are still packed evenings and weekends. He's taking the company private -- he says it will be profitable this year -- and he's spinning off a second company that has already sold dozens of kiosks to a Chili's restaurant in the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and to a senior center in Lancaster, California. In short, he's still happily scrambling.

Bushnell becomes even more animated as he talks about a start-up called Gamewager. Two kids from Texas are developing a system that allows video game players to compete remotely with one another for prizes. It's a virtual arcade. They cold-called him, he took the call, and he eventually agreed to provide them with a small amount of seed capital, since the company fits nicely into his vision of game play as a social experience. "They're so excited," he says of his newest protégés. "They're full of hope and optimism, and they're happy to sleep on my son's couch."

Two weeks later, I sit down with the Bushnells in Nolan's office. Nancy suggests that we not talk too much more about the dark years -- the bankruptcy of Chuck E. Cheese's, the failed IPO of Androbot, the loss of their home -- but it's hard to avoid Androbot when you're sitting at eye level with a 3-foot-tall android. The conversation inevitably makes its way to robots.

"I love them, but I'm not allowed to build them," Bushnell says, looking at his wife. "Nancy put me in a robot 12-step program."

I ask how many robot companies he's started.

"Two," he says, definitively.

"Only two?" I ask.

He revises, "Well, three."

"What about the talking teddy bear?"

"Oh. That's perilously close, too." (In fact, the number is either four or five, depending on, among other things, whether or not an animatronic rat counts as a robot.)

At this point, Nancy excuses herself, looking queasy. I start to ask another question, but Bushnell interrupts me. "I just want the future to happen faster," he says breathlessly. Coming as it does in Nancy's absence, this sounds almost like a confession. "I can't imagine the future without robots," he adds, before quoting the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay, who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Bushnell goes on: "I actually think the technology is here. If I really -- " He drops his voice and cranes his neck toward the hallway to see if he's in the clear. "She's out of the room now, but I'd love to take another run at it," he says. "I really understand the technology, and in some ways, I've already proven the market." Bushnell is serious, but he's smiling, too -- still the hustler on the midway, now offering himself another go.

In the spirit of marital harmony, I don't mention Nolan's plans when Nancy returns. Instead, I ask him if the game is still fun after all these years.

"Absolutely," he says. "Always."

Max Chafkin, Inc.'s senior writer, wrote about the dating website Plenty of Fish for the January/February issue.

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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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