Nolan Bushnell | Code Like It's 198x

In the summer of 1982 the first issue of the American magazine Video Games sent a writer to interview “the most legendary figure in the brief—but frenzied—history of video games”. He found Nolan Bushnell, 39, not at Atari but at the Sunnyvale headquarters of a pizza chain whose restaurants were run by animatronic animals. Bushnell had sold Atari six years earlier. The interviewer’s first real question was about the credit he always got for Pong, and Bushnell’s answer was candid: “The software for Pong was written by an engineer named Al Alcorn.”

That mixture runs through Bushnell’s whole career. He did not invent the video game, and said so. What he did, more than anyone else in the early 1970s, was turn it into a business: he made the first coin-operated video game to be built in quantity and sold, co-founded Atari, and then spent four decades starting companies, some of which worked.

Fast facts

Born: 5 February 1943, in Clearfield, Utah.
Education: electrical engineering at the University of Utah, graduating at the end of 1968.
First game: Computer Space (1971), built and sold by Nutting Associates.
Atari: founded with Ted Dabney; incorporated on 27 June 1972.
Pong: specified by Bushnell and built by Al Alcorn; in the arcades from autumn 1972.
Sold Atari: to Warner Communications in October 1976, for a reported $28 million.
Left Atari: after a clash with Warner’s management at the end of 1978.
Pizza Time Theatre: the Chuck E. Cheese restaurants, the first opened in San Jose in 1977; the company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1984.
Later: the Catalyst Technologies incubator (1981), Androbot, Etak, Sente, uWink; a seat on the board of Atari SA from 2010.

Utah and Spacewar!

Bushnell grew up in Clearfield, Utah. Video Games reported that he became one of the youngest people to get a ham radio licence and repaired televisions part-time in high school. He transferred to the University of Utah in 1965, where a friend from the chess club showed him Spacewar!, the space combat game written on a PDP-1 at MIT. The university’s computer science department, headed by David Evans, was one of the pioneers of computer graphics, and Bushnell used to go over at night to play. He even modified the Utah version: “I wanted to make a change to make the rocket ships move faster.”

His summer job gave him the other half of the idea. He worked as manager of the games department at an amusement park near Salt Lake City (Retro Gamer names it as Lagoon), and he was struck by how old-fashioned the attractions were. “Knocking milk bottles over with a baseball is not the most contemporary game in the world,” he told Video Games. A computer game like Spacewar! would make money, he thought, “but it just didn’t make economic sense at the time. It would have taken a heck of a lot of quarters to pay for an $8 million computer.”

Computer Space

After graduating at the end of 1968, Bushnell went to work as an engineer at Ampex, the videotape company. Around 1969 or 1970 he went back to the idea. He first imagined several screens linked to one central computer, then saw that he could do without the computer entirely: “one day it just hit me: I can do this whole thing in hardware.”

With a colleague from Ampex, Ted Dabney, he formed a partnership called Syzygy, and in 1971 they built a coin-operated version of Spacewar!, Computer Space. Bushnell sold it to Nutting Associates, a local coin-op maker, and went to work there as chief engineer to put it into production. It was a hard game to learn. Bill Nutting told Video Games that “we built 1,500 and had to sell some by force”; Bushnell remembered about 2,000. Either way it earned him royalties. Bushnell decided that Computer Space, which needed a page of instructions, had been too complicated, and that his next game would have to be simpler.

Atari and Pong

Bushnell asked Nutting for an option on a third of the company and a say in marketing. “They basically said, ‘No, Nolan, you’re a good engineer,’” he recalled, offering five percent instead. “Two days later, I resigned and set up Atari.” David Sheff’s account has Bushnell and Dabney putting in $250 each; Bushnell told Video Games that “Atari was founded on royalties from Computer Space”. The name Syzygy was already taken, so they chose a word from the Japanese board game Go. In Go, Bushnell explained, atari “is a polite warning to your opponent that he’s about to be engulfed. It’s something like check in chess.” The company was incorporated on 27 June 1972.

Atari’s first full-time engineer was Al Alcorn, who had worked with Bushnell at Ampex, and his first job was a ping-pong game. The Pong entry tells the story in full. Bushnell always said he had meant it as a practice exercise: “I asked him to do a sort of simple Ping-Pong kind of game as a practice exercise, a throwaway, really. It turned out to be a heck of a lot of fun, so we decided to market it on the way to the driving game.” On who made it, he was generous and competitive at once: “He did the software, but I designed the game… Alcorn steadfastly maintains that he designed it and I maintain that I did. I always tell him I get the credit because I have more access to the press than he does.” More than twenty years later he went further, telling Retro Gamer that “when people say I created Pong, they’re missing something — Al brought a lot to the project and he made it what it was.” Alcorn, for his part, told Edge in 2012 that Bushnell “was the driving force behind the whole thing”, and that he “never would’ve done it without Ted’s invention and Nolan’s passion”.

The idea itself was not new. On 24 May 1972, a month before Atari was incorporated, Bushnell played the ping-pong game on Magnavox’s Odyssey console at a dealer demonstration in Burlingame, California. Ralph Baer, who designed the Odyssey, said flatly that “Pong was a derivative of Odyssey”. Judge John F. Grady, hearing Magnavox v. Chicago Dynamic Industries, found that when Bushnell saw the Odyssey game, “what he did basically was to copy it”. Bushnell’s own view, given to Video Games in 1984, was: “I didn’t see how anyone could patent a ping-pong game.” Atari settled with Magnavox and paid royalties.

Running Atari

Pong was a hit, and it was copied everywhere. Bushnell’s answer to the distributors was a second company. Each city had two big distributors, and each wanted exclusive rights, so Atari set up Kee Games, run by Bushnell’s friend Joe Keenan, which produced its own versions of Atari’s games for the other distributor. “It was a kind of subterfuge, if you will,” Bushnell admitted in 1982.

Ted Dabney did not stay. He sold his half of the company to Bushnell before the Warner sale; Wikipedia, citing Marty Goldberg and Curt Vendel’s history of Atari, dates his departure to 1973.

Atari became known for its informality. Sheff, who interviewed Bushnell at length, describes staff in ripped jeans and a founder in flower-print shirts. Steve Jobs, who joined in 1974, remembered that “the smell of marijuana ran freely through the air-conditioning system”. Atari’s research group worked from a think tank at Grass Valley, and Bushnell defended it when Video Games asked about his management style: “I happen to think that you can’t manage extremely creative people in the traditional ways.” According to Sheff, it was Bushnell who offered Jobs a bonus for every chip he could cut from the design of Breakout, and who later turned down Jobs’s offer of a stake in Apple.

Growth needed more money than Atari had. Bushnell sold Atari’s loss-making Japanese business to Namco. The home Pong of 1975 sold well through Sears, but the cash went straight back into stock, and a programmable console would cost far more to launch.

Warner, and leaving

Warner Communications bought Atari in October 1976. Electronic Games and Sheff give the price as $28 million; Video Games said $32 million, of which “Bushnell’s take was just under half”. “We were exhausted,” Bushnell told Sheff. “The offer from Warner was a relief.” He stayed as chairman, and the Atari 2600 went on sale in 1977.

It did not last. “It just wasn’t fun anymore when it wasn’t mine,” Bushnell said later. By Sheff’s account he disagreed with Warner’s managers on almost everything: he wanted to cut the price of the 2600, close the pinball business, and let outside companies write software for Atari’s coming computers. At Warner’s budget meeting in New York in November 1978 he and Warner’s Manny Gerard shouted at each other, and soon afterwards Bushnell left, with $1 million in cash, debentures worth about $12 million, and an agreement not to compete with Atari for seven years. Ray Kassar took charge. Antic dated Bushnell’s departure to January 1979.

Pizza Time Theatre

Bushnell had been planning a restaurant since about 1974, and he kept the idea when he sold Atari. He wanted “a family place where parents were encouraged” to play games with their children: “I didn’t like the idea of them having to hang out in pool halls or junkie arcades in order to enjoy them.” Warner opened one centre and lost interest, and in June 1977, Bushnell said, he and Joe Keenan bought the concept back for $500,000. The first Pizza Time Theatre opened in 1977 at the Town and Country Village in San Jose, combining a pizza restaurant, an arcade and a stage show of computer-controlled animatronic characters: Chuck E. Cheese, Jasper T. Jowls and Harmony Howlette. His hero, he told Video Games, was Walt Disney. By mid-1982 there were more than 60 centres.

The boom did not survive the crash. In November 1983 Videogaming Illustrated reported that Pizza Time had closed ten restaurants because of poor earnings. Sheff tells how Bushnell was sailing in the Transpac yacht race when the company reported a $10 million quarterly loss; the board wanted outside management, and Bushnell resigned. Pizza Time filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1984. The Chuck E. Cheese restaurants carried on under new owners.

Catalyst and the companies after

In 1981 Bushnell founded Catalyst Technologies in Sunnyvale, which he called his “fifty-thousand-square-foot incubator”: start-ups got offices, staff and money, and Bushnell took a large share of each. Sheff lists what came out of it. Etak made one of the first electronic car maps and was bought by Rupert Murdoch for $35 million in 1985. ByVideo was an early video catalogue for ordering goods by computer. Androbot built personal robots and was Bushnell’s favourite; it collapsed after he had put in $12 million of his own money.

Games came back through Sente, a coin-op company owned by Pizza Time. Its name was another Go term, and Bushnell announced in 1983 that Atari had bought the home rights to its games: “I’m looking forward to working again with Atari.” After Pizza Time went into Chapter 11, Electronic Games reported in September 1984 that Bally had agreed to buy Sente, with Bushnell staying on to lead it.

In January 1991 he was on stage for Commodore at the Consumer Electronics Show, presenting the CDTV, a compact disc player for the television that could run encyclopaedias and children’s books. He was the commissioner of the Professional Gamers’ League, which began in 1997 as one of the first leagues for professional esports. By 2000 he was chairman and chief executive of uWink, which put networked games into bars and public places, and later ran uWink restaurants with touchscreens at every table. “The videogame industry has currently been doing the same thing over and over again, with little innovation,” he told Retro Gamer. In 2010 he joined the board of Atari SA, the former Infogrames that then owned the Atari name, and in 2012 he founded BrainRush, which made educational software.

The Pioneer Award

In January 2018 the organisers of the Game Developers Conference announced that Bushnell would receive their Pioneer Award. Critics pointed to accounts of how women had been treated at Atari in the 1970s, and within a day the organisers withdrew the award, saying that their choices “should reflect the values of today’s game industry”. Bushnell accepted the decision. He apologised “if my personal actions or the actions of anyone who ever worked with me offended or caused pain”, and said he applauded the conference “for ensuring that their institution reflects what is right, especially with regards to how people should be treated in the workplace.”

Sources

Jerry Bowles, “Video Games Interview: Nolan Bushnell”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, pp. 16–21 and 78–79: the introduction (age 39, Pizza Time headquarters, the Warner price and Bushnell’s share, the first Pizza Time in 1977 and more than 60 centres); Pong and Alcorn; Spacewar!, David Evans and the amusement park; Computer Space, Nutting and Syzygy; the name Atari; leaving Nutting; Kee Games and Joe Keenan; buying Pizza Time back from Warner; the family restaurant; Grass Valley.
Frank Lovece, “The Birth of a Notion”, Video Games, vol. 2 no. 4, January 1984, pp. 42–43: Bushnell’s birth, ham radio licence, the University of Utah and Spacewar!, graduation and Ampex; Syzygy with Ted Dabney; Computer Space at Nutting; the Odyssey demonstration on 24 May 1972; Judge Grady’s finding; Bushnell’s reply; the settlement.
Steve Bloom, “The incredible, incredible story of Atari”, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, pp. 40–41: Bill Nutting on Computer Space; the incorporation date, as set out in the Atari entry.
Steve Bloom, interview with Ralph Baer, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983: “Pong was a derivative of Odyssey”, as set out in the Pong entry.
David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999), chapter on Bushnell: $250 each; the $28 million sale; Atari’s culture and Jobs’s recollection; Breakout and Apple; leaving Warner and its terms; Catalyst, Etak, ByVideo and Androbot; the Transpac, the resignation and Chapter 11; Commodore and CDTV in January 1991; Computer Space needing a full page of directions. The same book gives the sale of Atari Japan, as set out in the Namco entry.
Electronic Games, October 1984, p. 13: Warner’s purchase of Atari “in 1976 for $28 million”.
Dan Gutman, Antic, vol. 2 no. 2, May 1983, p. 61: Bushnell leaving Atari in January 1979, as set out in the Atari 2600 entry.
Atari Age, vol. 2 no. 3, September–October 1983, p. 12: Sente, owned by Pizza Time Theatre, and Atari’s home rights to its games; Bushnell’s quote.
Videogaming Illustrated, November 1983, p. 10: Pizza Time closing ten stores; Sente and Androbot.
Electronic Games, September 1984, p. 10: Bally to buy Sente after Pizza Time’s Chapter 11 filing.
Computer Gaming World issue 164, March 1998, p. 219: the Professional Gamers’ League and “commissioner Nolan Bushnell”.
Classic Gamer Magazine, vol. 1 no. 2, 2000: Bushnell as chairman and chief executive of uWink.com.
David Crookes, Nolan Bushnell profile, Retro Gamer issue 21, pp. 58–61: Clearfield, Lagoon, “Al brought a lot to the project”, Dabney selling his half to Bushnell, the uWink restaurants and his view of the industry.
Edge issue 248, Christmas 2012, pp. 129–130: Computer Space as “the world’s first mass-produced commercial arcade videogame”; interview with Al Alcorn.
Retro Gamer issue 103, June 2012: Bushnell joining the board of Atari SA in 2010.
Cecilia D’Anastasio, “Sex, Pong, And Pioneers: What Atari Was Really Like, According To Women Who Were There”, Kotaku, 12 February 2018 (web, secondary): the withdrawal of the award and Bushnell’s statement. https://kotaku.com/sex-pong-and-pioneers-what-atari-was-really-like-ac-1822930057
Wikipedia, “Nolan Bushnell” (web, secondary): Dabney’s departure in 1973 (citing Goldberg and Vendel, Atari Inc.: Business Is Fun, 2012), the date of the Atari SA appointment, BrainRush, and the January 2018 announcement and withdrawal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell