New interview with Nolan Bushnell

[+Nathan Strum]

Sorry if this has been posted umpteen times already, but I didn't see it in this forum...

 

New interview with Nolan Bushnell

[Rob Mitchell]

Might as well post the text here:

 

Don't tell Nolan Bushnell there are no second acts in American life. Or third or fourth, for that matter.

The entrepreneur and Silicon Valley pioneer pretty much created the video game industry with the founding of Atari in the 1970s. He made another bundle in the 1980s by launching the Chuck E. Cheese's chain of pizza parlors. He jump-started the automobile navigation system industry with the company that eventually became Etak.

 

Bushnell also had some failures along the way. His crack at the PC market, the Atari 800, was steamrolled by former Atari employees Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and their early Apple Computer systems. Androbot, his 1980s effort to popularize household robots, never got a product to market.

 

But Bushnell figures he's got at least one more breakthrough left in him. The entrepreneur started uWink, a somewhat mysterious entertainment technology venture, a few years ago and pledges to reveal a breakthrough technology soon that will build on many of his previous innovations.

 

Bushnell reviewed the highs and lows of his past with CNET News.com while in San Francisco recently for his induction into the Walk of Game, a new shrine of video game history.

 

You started playing computer games when you were working on mainframes in the 1960s. What made you think this could be some type of consumer technology?

Bushnell: The link was that I was working in an amusement park at the time. I was pursuing an engineering degree in the winter and working in the game department at a regional amusement park in Utah in the summer. What that gave me was knowledge of how the

 

"I feel in some way that I didn't invent the video game--I commercialized it." financial side of the arcade business worked. And it was very easy to see that what I was playing on the mainframes, if I could bring it to the cost structure of an amusement park, that it would work.

 

I feel in some way that I didn't invent the video game--I commercialized it. The real digital video game was invented by a few guys who programmed PDP-1s at MIT. The very first time a video screen was connected to a computer, one of the first things the engineers thought of was playing a game on it.

 

The Magnavox Odyssey got to market a wee bit before Atari. What gave you the edge?

Bushnell: Magnavox didn't invent the digital video game. They had an analog game. A lot of people don't realize that back in those days, there was a big fight over which would be bigger, the digital computer or the analog computer. They did an excellent job of creating a game using analog circuitry, but it just wasn't fun.

 

The classic Atari games still show up on phones and other gadgets. Have you been surprised at how durable those games have been?

Bushnell: Actually not. I think that at the core of every game, there's timing, tensioning and strategy. In some ways, the old games are a little bit purer because they completely focused on those elements instead of production values.

 

If you have a tournament chess player, they will only play with one kind of chess set. They don't want pieces made of glass or intricately carved things. All those production values that make

 

"We were known as a party place, but the important thing is that parties didn't happen unless quotas were made." very pretty chess sets actually make the game harder to play. In some ways, if you focus on production values and you short-change rules and structure, you end up with a poorer game than something that's really simple.

 

When did you start to realize you had a real phenomenon going with Atari?

Bushnell: It was a gradual process. The first indication was when we collected the money out of the first (arcade) "Pong" game, and there was so much in there it had jammed the coin mechanism. At that point in time, I knew I had a successful business.

 

But were you thinking, "Now we'll put one of these in every home?"

Bushnell: Not really. It was a situation where the technology was so expensive at that time, and not very reliable. I felt that in the home, you needed to have something much more reliable and at a significantly lower cost. We started out in the arcade business, and that worked fine. The next epiphany, if you would, was when we figured out we could put Pong on a single LSI chip...All of a sudden, we knew we could put one in every home. All of a sudden, we went from a very successful coin-op business to a potential consumer business.

 

Then the microprocessor got strong enough. Remember, the first games were not computers at all; they were really digital signal generators, if you will. You couldn't run a program fast enough in those days. The microprocessor, the 4-bit 4004, wasn't invented until 1974. Our first game came out in 1970. We were four years before the microprocessor. And the 4004 still wasn't good enough. We had to wait until we got to the 6502 or the 6800 series before there was even a possibility. Even then, they were too slow. We had to develop the Stella chip...which basically did all the screen refresh and other things that have to happen in real time, much faster than a microprocessor running at 300KHz could possibly do.

 

What precipitated your decision to sell Atari to Warner Communications (in 1976)? Was it just more fun to start a company than run one?

Bushnell: What happened is a growing business consumes capital at prodigious rates. And Wall Street had a hard time distinguishing between the frivolity of our product and the fact that it was a serious business. Raising capital was very, very difficult for us. In order to go into the consumer marketplace, we just needed much deeper pockets, and that's why we decided to sell.

 

Besides video games, you also came that close to launching the PC business. What gave Apple the edge over the Atari 800?

Bushnell: The big difference was Warner Communications against Steve Jobs. Warner could never win that one. I don't know if I could have, but I wouldn't have made the same mistakes Warner did.

 

The main problem that allowed Apple to dominate was, in fact, not technology but business strategy. Steve was out evangelizing to software developers to build software for their machines.

 

Our strategy with the video games was that we basically wanted to give away the hardware and make money on the software. That called for a quasi-closed system. Warner thought that was the right way to do the computers business, too. So they said, "Not only are we not going to help third-party developers, we're going to sue you if you use our operating environment." So everybody that wanted to get into the software business supported Apple over Atari.

 

So basically Warner drove the coffin nail in the Atari 800, despite it having a clearly superior chipset, a better operating environment...We had a lot of innovations in the Atari 800 that became standard later on.

 

What would the PC business be like now if the 800 had been given a chance?

Bushnell: I know I wouldn't have made the mistakes Warner did.

 

Would you have made the mistakes Apple did later on?

Bushnell: I don't know. It's so gratuitous to say, "No, I would have been much smarter." I think that it would have been a good horse race.

 

Atari was known for being a very fun place to work, which seems to have gone out of the video game industry. Any advice for game developers today?

Bushnell: Atari's strategy was actually quite simple and, I think, quite elegant. We were known as a party place, but the important thing is that parties didn't happen unless quotas were made. We had a lot of parties because people made their numbers...We had a very young work force that was more interested in having a party than making more money, so there was a sound business principle behind the parties.

 

Is it possible to run a company that way now, when it takes years and millions of dollars to make a game?

Bushnell: I think it would be hard. At the same time, I believe you can either treat employees as equals, as adults, in which you treat everybody with equal dignity. Or you can have a monarchy, where there are the executives and there are the serfs. Monarchies work, but in today's world, where people are highly educated, highly capable and highly mobile, I think treating them like adults is a better way.

 

You started out at a time when good ideas and hard work were all you needed. How has entrepreneurship changed since then?

Bushnell: I think it's still the same. I think the next Apple or the next Atari will be started within the next few months, we just won't know it for five years.

 

The venture capital process hasn't mucked everything up with focus groups and strategic planning?

Bushnell: In some ways the VC process has hurt things. I feel that in some ways, it's perhaps a blessing that Atari could not raise capital from third parties, so we had to do it by tricks and gimmicks. We didn't raise any venture capital until we were $40 million in sales.

 

The venture capitalists are clearly a catalyst to making things happen faster...but I think it does represent a break from some of the creative business structures that were started. For instance, you can trace the casual dress code back to Atari. And it came from the premise that we don't care how you look, we don't care when you come to work--as long as the work gets done. It's part of treating people like adults.

 

You were right about video games, right about high-tech pizza parlors. What about personal robots? Were you just ahead of the curve there?

The personal robot, to me, was a defeat--and it was a defeat based on unintended consequences. We had a PC at the core, and in those days, noise immunity on a computer was very, very low. What we could not solve was that robots running across any surface would generate static electricity. When the static electricity was discharged, sometimes just across the bearings of the wheels, that was enough to reset the computer. We tried all kinds of isolation approaches.

 

With a computer, (if) you get the blue screen of death, you reboot, you go forward. In a robot environment, if you have a computer failure, all your sensors go out, all your fail-safe stuff. So the robot can be locked into a mode where it's going full-speed into a wall. We used to laughingly call that the "mow the baby" mode. It was a thing where we never felt the robot was ready for the marketplace.

 

I'm a little confused on what the plan is for uWink. Seems like you've got your finger in a lot of pies, from arcade games to mobile phones.

Bushnell: Within (a few) weeks, all will be made clear. We'll have a major announcement soon. Think of all these little pieces of technology that we have in our product lines, aiming toward a direction in which I had to develop certain pieces of technology, and I thought I'd monetize it on the way, but they were never the end goal.

 

So an autonomous, video game playing, coin-op pizza parlor robot?

Bushnell: (Chuckling) You forgot navigation systems.

 

Any regrets, like letting Steve Jobs quit, or selling Atari too cheap?

Bushnell: You can spend your life doing woulda, shoulda, coulda. I wish I hadn't sold to Warner, because I think that the world would be a very different place with Atari being the preeminent video game company today. It really bothers me that Sony and Nintendo and all those guys harvested the business that should have been rightly ours. The center of gravity moved east, and it should rightly have been here.

[+Random Terrain]

Who in the hell wants to read a real interview? I only read fake ones.

[Curt Vendel]

I love how he talks about the Atari 800 computer system as if he really knew anything about it, he was gone Dec 78' The only thing he'd really seen was the pre-800 design based on a TIA chip that he, Steve Bristow and Joe Keenan flew up to Cyan Engineering in Grass Valley several months before his departure from Atari.

 

Also, I can tell you from friends and from personal experience, Nolan treats his employee's like pee-on's, not adults as he states in his interview, unless of course by Adults he means having them work, then laying everyone off and never paying them a dime in salary or consulting fee's Or like with one management member who put $500,000 into the company, moved out to CA. Then Nolan fired him, the $500K loan, must've slipped Nolan's mind to repay the guy. The rest of the interview isn't too bad though.

 

So I'll be curious to see what new innovation Nolan is going to release, right now the only innovation he's been working on is how to bilk investors out of $2million at a pop, squander the cash in 6 months or less, show no product and shop around for another $2mill again, he's been doing that now for 6+ years and then add to the fact that he and his partner absconded off to Europe for about 3-4 years back in 95 when $20 million in Playnet funds mysteriously disappeared after Playnet failed to produce network capable product, much like uWink doesn't right now (which would make sense since uWink is based off of Playnet IP) I guess Nolan forgot to mention how he's burned every bridge in the US coin-op/amusement industry and how he was cursed off of the AMOA floor last year...

 

If his great new innovation is his "crack dispenser" then he's in for another let down.... He has a new bear vending machine, the only problem is the bears are vacuum compressed down into a little dark brown square block, so it looks like kids are buying a chunk of black tar herion, not a fluffy toy until you remove the plastic and it inflates back to a little handheld bear. He showed his "innovation" at one of the latest coin-op shows and people around the show were cracking up laughing because they were saying Nolan is now pushing crack to kids, he's so desperate for another great hit.

 

Too bad Nolan is so busy doing interviews, maybe if he wasn't doing so many he'd stop and spend some time to pay his employee's and consultants, speaking of which my check must still be in the mail all these years along with my 2 developer stations which were never returned... me, bitter, nah, just figure people should see him for who he really is, he was a great man once, but he is a huckster today...

 

 

 

Curt

[+Random Terrain]

. . . just figure people should see him for who he really is, he was a great man once, but he is a huckster today...

You'd love this old interview I have here from some magazine called Microkids. He tells you how to do it your way. That was back when he was Mr. Chuck E. Cheese guy.

[+Nathan Strum]

he was a great man once, but he is a huckster today...

 

I think he's always been a huckster to some degree. Only that sort of personality type would've been able to found Atari in the first place, when video games were a completely unknown quantity. (Maybe that's where Steve Jobs learned it from. ) The whole Kee Games thing is a great example of hucksterism.

 

I have a great admiration for Nolan for starting Atari and (as he puts it) commercializing video games. After the whole Chuck E. Cheese thing though, that sort of disappeared. I mean... yuck. Worst... pizza... ever.

[Rob Mitchell]

After the whole Chuck E. Cheese thing though, that sort of disappeared. I mean... yuck. Worst... pizza... ever.

 

I think his original name for the pizza joint was "Pizza Time Theatre" before CE. Cheese.

 

What's AMOA stand for?

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[Tempest]

Curt Vendel wrote:  

he was a great man once, but he is a huckster today...  

 

I think he's always been a huckster to some degree.

 

I get that feeling too. I don't really want to bad mouth him, because I did meet him once and he seemed like a nice guy, but I don't think he lives up to the 'living legend' status we all crown him with.

 

When I heard him give a speech about the early years of Atari, I didn't sense the 'love' that I thought he'd have for Atari. I got the sense from him that Atari was just another business venture, and once he sold it he was onto something else. I was severely disappointed, and kind of shocked really. Almost like when you find out that your hero doesn't live up to the hype you've bought into for 20+ years. I think we all forget that Nolan was gone by 78-79, so he really didn't have anything to do with the Atari that most of us are familiar with (when the 2600 was king).

 

Nolan is an innovator to be sure, I don't discount what he did for Atari in the early years, but he's not the Atari God we all make him out to be. Honestly people like Jim Morgan, Ray Kassar, and (gasp) Jack Tramiel had more to do with the Atari we all know and love than Nolan did.

 

Tempest

[Tempest]

What's AMOA stand for?

 

Amusement & Music Operators Association.

 

Kind of like JAMMA (Japanese Arcade Machine Manufacturers Association).

 

Tempest

[Clint Thompson]

So what'd he get cursed out for? Details? VIDEO!?

[Mindfield]

Nolan is an innovator to be sure, I don't discount what he did for Atari in the early years, but he's not the Atari God we all make him out to be.  Honestly people like Jim Morgan, Ray Kassar, and (gasp) Jack Tramiel had more to do with the Atari we all know and love than Nolan did.  

 

Tempest

 

Yeah, but Ray Kassar was mostly responsible for choking the life out of Warner's Atari -- so much so that he's the reason Miller, Kaplan, Shaw, Crane and Whitehead left to form Activision. (Well, there was always the long standing tradition of not giving individual developers credit for their work that was the crux of the decision, but the work environment during Kassar's reign had also become hostile)

 

The Tramiels ... well, by and large that lot was just incompetent. It always struck me as curious that Jack was able to turn Commodore into a highly successful computer company (moreso than Atari) but was never able to do the same for Atari when he took over.

[Curt Vendel]

Tramiel never understood fully the true marketing power behind the name Atari, it's strength was as a game company, not a computer company and unfortunately he pushed his PC agenda over the gaming agenda and in doing so allow Nintendo to swoop in and nearly lock Atari out of its very lifeblood market, and while the ST's were innovative, not advertising took Atari's name out of the public mindshare, and then Tramiel focused on Europe over the US, thats why in Europe the ST's and Tramiels are praised, while in the US they are scorn.

 

Also their computer sales were slightly crippled, I as a loyal Atarian computer owner was not about to abandon my Atari 800 for a computer made by a former Commodore head, there was a very strong loyalty feud between Atari and Commodore computer owners, so to think of buying a Commodore in Atari clothing was unthinkable at the time. This was only compounded when so little was trickling out from Atari to support the 8bit community so that only made matters worse.

 

 

 

Curt

[rolenta]

speaking of which my check must still be in the mail all these years along with my 2 developer stations which were never returned

 

This must be an Atari-head trait. Ralph Bae ris still waiting for his check for his work with Tramiel's Atari.

[Mindfield]

This must be an Atari-head trait. Ralph Bae ris still waiting for his check for his work with Tramiel's Atari.

 

I'm sure Willy Higginbotham would have appreciated a royalty cheque or two from Ralph, too.

[rolenta]

I'm sure Willy Higginbotham would have appreciated a royalty cheque or two from Ralph, too.  

 

For what? Did Willy do work for Ralph?

 

And for the record, Ralph did not receive any royalties himself. Sanders and Magnavox did.

[Mindfield]

For what? Did Willy do work for Ralph?

 

And for the record, Ralph did not receive any royalties himself. Sanders and Magnavox did.

 

No -- I was mostly kidding. The debate over who really invented the video game -- Willy or Ralph -- was never solved as far as I know, but both of them argue that it was them (though Ralph's arguments recall long-lost sketches and concepts, while Willy's was an actual demonstration on an oscilloscope)

 

Frankly, I doubt that either of them could take the credit, considering A.L. Samuel demonstrated a Checkers game on an IBM 701 mainframe's LED readout in 1952 -- six years before Willy's "Tennis for Two."

[rolenta]

Ralph covers Willy Higinbotham, Steve Russel, and Nolan Bushnell in his book which I hope to be receiving very soon.

 

And Ralph's invention was a device that that hooks up to a standard television set in order to play games.

[Joey Kay]

I love how he talks about the Atari 800 computer system as if he really knew anything about it, he was gone Dec 78'  The only thing he'd really seen was the pre-800 design based on a TIA chip that he, Steve Bristow and Joe Keenan flew up to Cyan Engineering in Grass Valley several months before his departure from Atari.  

 

When I read that interview, that thought crossed my mind, too. What on earth did Nolan have to do with the computer industry???

 

Wasn't the 800 chipset designed for the next-gen video game machine, but somebody at Warner wanted to get Atari into the computer market, so they hijacked the project for a computer?

 

In reality, it's really hard to find a head of Atari who we could all agree on was truly great. That company is like a Shakespearean play... each of the main characters had a tragic flaw.

 

If I had time, I'd compare them all to Shakespeare figures.

 

Here's a start...

 

James Morgan - Hamlet - Indecisiveness cost him everything.

Ray Kassar - Macbeth - his thirst for power blinded him.

 

I'll figure out the others later... I have to get back to work... unless anyone else wants to add to this!

 

Cheers!

 

Joey

[rolenta]

When I read that interview, that thought crossed my mind, too.  What on earth did Nolan have to do with the computer industry???

 

Absolutely nothing. He was the one who told Steve Jobs to go somewhere else when Jobs wanted Atari to manufacture computers.

[Mental Vortex]

When I read that interview, that thought crossed my mind, too.  What on earth did Nolan have to do with the computer industry???

 

Absolutely nothing. He was the one who told Steve Jobs to go somewhere else when Jobs wanted Atari to manufacture computers.

 

Wow, there's something I didn't know! Guess I have a lot of reading to do about this subject.

[rolenta]

Wow, there's something I didn't know! Guess I have a lot of reading to do about this subject.

 

Here's what I wrote about it in the 1978 chapter of Phoenix:

 

"Eventually Bushnell began to disagree with the direction that Warner was steering Atari. The parent company wanted to add a home computer division. Bushnell did not agree with this venture. He publicly claimed that he was against it because he estimated that the company would lose $50 million just to set it up. He may have been against it for personal reasons also. When Atari had been in the deep financial trouble that eventually forced the sale of the company, he received a request from one of his designers. The young man who had created Atari’s arcade hit Breakout was on to something new that he figured Atari could benefit from. He had built an inexpensive microcomputer in his garage and told Bushnell that it would be a good product for Atari to market. With money so tight, the last thing that Atari could do was start a home computer division. Bushnell refused but he advised the designer to start his own company to manufacture home computers. Bushnell even gave the man the name of an investor who might be interested in such a venture. The designer, whose name was Steve Jobs, followed Bushnell’s advice and started his own company, which he called Apple Computers. Now the executives at Warner Communications wanted Atari to start a division to compete against Apple."

[Curt Vendel]

Right on the money Len !

 

 

 

Cut

[+Nathan Strum]

Wasn't the 800 chipset designed for the next-gen video game machine, but somebody at Warner wanted to get Atari into the computer market, so they hijacked the project for a computer?

 

Yep, but also because they felt the hardware would've cost too much for a videogame system. Nolan's plan of selling the videogame hardware at a loss in order to profit from software sales fell on deaf ears at Warner. It's common now, however.

 

If they'd gone ahead with that console, it would've been the equivilant of the Atari 5200, but about three years earlier (and hopefully with better controllers). I wonder how that could've changed the industry...

[Rob Mitchell]

A.L. Samuel demonstrated a Checkers game on an IBM 701 mainframe's LED readout in 1952

 

Ahmm .. LEDs were first marketed in the mid 1970s. Invented then I s'pose.

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

[Curt Vendel]

A.L. Samuel demonstrated a Checkers game on an IBM 701 mainframe's LED readout in 1952

 

Ahmm .. LEDs were first marketed in the mid 1970s. Invented then I s'pose.

 

Rob Mitchell, Atlanta, GA

 

 

The IBM 701 used lamps, not LEDs

 

 

 

Curt