Nolan Bushnell
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| Born: | February 5, 1943 (age 64) Clearfield, Utah |
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| Occupation: | Electrical engineer and entrepreneur |
Nolan K. Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who founded both Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters chain.
Bushnell has received a great deal of recognition, including being inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, receiving the Nations Restaurant News “Innovator of the Year” award, and being named one of Newsweek's "50 Men That Changed America". Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the video game industry.
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[edit] Early years and personal life
Bushnell graduated from the University of Utah electrical engineering program in 1968, and was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. He was one of many computer science students of the 1960s who played the historic Spacewar! game on DEC mainframe computers. The University of Utah was heavily involved in computer graphics research, and spawned a wide variety of Spacewar versions.
After selling Atari to Warner Communications for US$28,000,000, Bushnell purchased the former mansion of coffee magnate James Folger in Woodside, California, which he shared with his wife Nancy and their many children. ("Not bad for an ex-Mormon," jokes Bushnell.) The estate overlooked, among other things, the house of former Bushnell employee and Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs. The Bushnells now live in southern California.
Wife Nancy Bushnell operated the Lion and Compass restaurant in Sunnyvale, California.
Oldest child Alissa Bushnell (one of two children with his first wife, Paula), has worked for author and motivational speaker Anthony Robbins as well as running public relations for PeopleSoft while fending off Oracle Corporation and Larry Ellison. Alissa currently works with Nolan at uWink.
[edit] Entrepreneurship
[edit] Syzygy
In 1971, Bushnell and colleague Ted Dabney formed Syzygy with the intention of producing a Spacewar clone known as Computer Space. The “counter slip” state machine technology which drove Computer Space was later patented and served as the core technology for all arcade video games until 1975 when microprocessors appeared on the scene and soon became the technology of choice.
In order to keep the company alive while the machine was being prototyped, they also took on a route servicing broken pinball machines. Popular belief has it that Nolan Bushnell had built Computer Space, he even moved his daughter out of her bedroom to finish it. This however is not correct. It was in fact Ted Dabney who built the machine in his home and it was his daughter who was relegated to the living couch. Ted Dabney completed the prototype and Nolan Bushnell started to shop it around, looking for a manufacturer. They eventually reached an agreement with Nutting Associates, a maker of coin-op trivia and shooting games, who produced a fiberglass cabinet for the unit that combined a coin-slot mechanism.
Computer Space proved to be too far ahead of its time and was a commercial failure. Though Computer Space enjoyed over US$3,000,000 in sales, Bushnell felt that the poor marketing of Nutting left significant sales on the table and decided that his next game would be licensed to a bigger manufacturer.
[edit] Atari
In 1972, Bushnell and Dabney set off on their own, and learning that the name "Syzygy" was in use by a candle company owned by a Mendocino hippy commune, they incorporated under the name Atari, a reference to a check-like position in the game Go. They rented their first office on Scott Boulevard in Sunnyvale, CA. They then contracted with Bally Manufacturing to create a driving game. To handle the additional work they hired their first employee Al Alcorn. Bushnell later bought out Dabney, who was worried about the success of the video game market, and decided to take over the pinball servicing route instead.
Despite his initial denials - Nolan Bushnell signed the guestbook at the Burlingame, CA demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey and set about the task of taking the Magnavox tennis game design and making a Coin-op version of it as a test project for Atari's new engineer, Allan Alcorn. Allan Alcorn would incorporate many of his own improvements to the game design such as scoring and sound and PONG was born. Alcorn had it installed at a bar in Grass Valley, California and a tavern in Sunnyvale, California called Andy Capp's (which has since become the Rooster T. Feathers comedy club). PONG proved to be very popular, so popular that one "service call" turned out to be due to the barrel they used as a cabinet and coin bank was overflowing and new quarters could no longer be inserted. On another call Alcorn was greeted by a lineup of people waiting for the bar to open in order to play the game.
In 1974, Engineers Harold Lee and Bob Brown approached Al Alcorn with an idea to develop a home version of PONG. Thanks to a marketing and distribution agreement with Sears, PONG sales soared when the unit was released in 1975. In 1976, Steve Bristow and Nolan Bushnell created a concept for a totally new kind of Pong - call Breakout. The project was given to an annoying and often troublesome Atari employee Steve Jobs who in turn has his friend Steve Wozniak build the prototype. Jobs was paid $5,000 for the game, but told Wozniak he only got $700 and gave Wozniak his share - $350.00 Meanwhile, using borrowed parts from Atari, these two budding engineers created a home computer. They offered the design to Bushnell but Atari was in no financial position to act upon it.
By 1976 Atari was in the midst of developing the Atari VCS (Video Computer System, later renamed the Atari 2600), but Bushnell realized that if the company was going to grow, it needed capital and with the stock market in a bleak condition, going public would not be the solution. He wrote a list of companies to approach to buy Atari. Meanwhile Steve Ross - CEO of Warner Communications witnessed an amazing sight - his children were hovering around videogame cabinets and Disney World. Looking further into these machines, he saw a whole new future. Warner Communications then contacted Atari to discuss purchasing the company. For $28million, Warner Communications (now Time Warner) bought Atari, bringing the capital they needed for the VCS launch. The launch took place in August of 1977, revolutionizing the home video game market, and introducing a new era in video game consoles. Demand for the unit was so great that Atari executives manned the production lines to help with the assembly and packaging during that first Christmas after its release.
Bushnell was eventually forced out of the company in November of 1978 after a dispute with Warner over the future direction of the company, notably on their closed software strategy (later changed) for the home computer division.
By 1982, Atari had become a US$2 billion empire and "the fastest-growing company in the history of American business" (Cohen). Atari held this title until being surpassed by Apple Computer, which was started by former Atari employee Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak.
In the late 1980s, Bushnell company Axlon managed the development of two new games for the Atari 2600, most likely as part of a marketing attempt to revive sales of the system, already more than a decade old. (By that time, Atari had been split into two entities: the consumer-product company Atari Corp., run by Jack Tramiel and family, and coin-operated games maker Atari Games.)
[edit] Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre
While still at Atari in 1977, Bushnell had purchased Pizza Time Theatre back from Warner Communications (as Pizza Time was created by Bushnell and was originally developed as distribution channel for Atari Games while Bushnell was at Atari), a place where kids could go and eat pizza and play video games. The Pizza Time Theatre / Chuck E. Cheese's also had animatronic animals that played music as entertainment. (Bushnell had always wanted to work for Walt Disney, but was continually turned down for employment when he was first starting out after graduation; Chuck E. Cheese's was his homage to Disney and the technology developed there.) In 1981 Bushnell turned day-to-day food operations of Chuck E. Cheese’s to a newly-hired restaurant executive and focused on Catalyst Technologies.
Through 1982 and 1983 Nolan had been concentrating on his Chuck E. Cheese's subsidiaries and side projects, such as Catalyst Technologies. Much to the criticism of some, he had been funding these by taking money out of Chuck E. Cheese (such as with video game company Sente, which was made a subsidiary) or taking out massive loans based on Chuck E. Cheese stock. To make matters worse, Chuck E. Cheese’s had started to lose money in 1982 and was now in the red.
Bushnell continued to spend money on side projects and spend more and more time with his yacht, Charlie. By the time Bushnell's spending and lack of involvement caught up with him, it was too late and Chuck E. Cheese was facing bankruptcy. President and long time friend Joe Keenan resigned that fall. Nolan tried to step back in, blaming the money problems on over expansion and saturation in local markets by the management team. He resigned in February of 1984, when his attempt was rebuffed by the Board of Directors. Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theaters (now named after its famous mouse mascot) entered bankruptcy in the fall of 1984.
ShowBiz Pizza, a competing Pizza/Arcade family restaurant then purchased Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre and assumed their debt. The newly formed company, ShowBiz Pizza Time, operated restaurants under both brands for a period of time before unifying all locations under the Chuck E. Cheese's brand. Today over 500 locations of this restaurant are in business, and it remains highly successful.
[edit] Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital Group
Bushnell founded the Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital Group, one of the first business incubators. The Catalyst Group companies included Androbot, Etak, Cumma, Axlon and many more. Axlon launched many consumer and consumer electronic products successfully, most notably AG Bear, a bear that mumbled/echoed a child's words back to him/her; Axlon was largely sold to Hasbro. Etak was the first company to digitize the maps of the world, ultimately providing the backbone for Google maps, mapquest.com, and other navigation systems; Etak was sold to Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s.
[edit] Sente
In 1984, Bushnell once again entered the video game business, when he founded Sente Games. (Sente is the Japanese term for the initiative or control in Go, Bushnell's favorite game). Bally/Midway agreed to be Sente's distributor; the list of published Sente titles includes the popular one-on-one hockey game, Hat Trick (1984).
[edit] uWink
Bushnell's most recent company is uWink, which has gone through several failed iterations including a touch-screen kiosk designer and an online Entertainment Systems network. (In 1988 and 1989, Bushnell operated Bots, Inc., which developed similar systems of customer-side point-of-sale touch-screen terminals in addition to autonomous pizza-delivery robots for Little Caesar's Pizza.) After nearly 7 years and over $24million in investor funding, the latest version (announced in 2005) is a new interactive entertainment restaurant called the uWink Media Bistro, whose concept builds off his Chuck E. Cheese venture. Guests may order food and drinks via screens at each table, through which guests may also enjoy games, movie trailers and short videos. (Bushnell had pioneered this concept through Bots nearly 20 years earlier.) The first Bistro has opened in Woodland Hills, California on October 16, 2006. Since the concept is not unique or proprietary and other outlets are sure to emulate and perhaps improve on uWinks concept, it is questionable whether uWink can sustain itself once the Wow factor wears off.
[edit] Other ventures
In 1991, Bushnell endorsed the Commodore International CDTV, a CD-ROM-based version of the Amiga 500 computer repackaged for the consumer electronics market.
In 2005, he served as a judge on the USA Network reality series Made in the USA.
[edit] References
- Zap: the Rise and Fall of Atari, by Scott Coen (1984) ISBN 0-7388-6883-3
- Gaming 101: A Contemporary History of PC and Video Games, by George Jones (2005) ISBN 1-55622-080-4
- The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon--The story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World, by Steven L. Kent (2001) ISBN 0-7615-3643-4
- High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, by Rusel DeMaria, Johnny L. Wilson (2003) ISBN 0-07-223172-6
- The First Quarter, by Steven L. Kent
[edit] External links
- San Jose Mercury News Podcast Interview with Bushnell
- The Dot Eaters entry on Bushnell and Atari
- An interview with Bushnell
- Discovery Channel Interview with Bushnell
- uWink
