Awesome Achievers in Technology

MEET NOLAN BUSHNELL

If there’s ever a choice between playing video games and reading a book, I’d take the book every time. But I still admire the creative geniuses behind video games, especially Nolan Bushnell, who’s widely considered the Father of Electronic Gaming.

You might say that Mr. Bushnell was a born tinkerer and inventor; he was the kind of kid who would have been perfect for Shark Tank, had it existed in the 1950s and 1960s. As a teenager, he developed a roller-skate-mounted liquid fuel rocket in his garage. He also had a successful television repair business at that time, and he later worked at an amusement park while getting an electrical engineering degree at the University of Utah.

Not long after graduation, Mr. Bushnell moved to Silicon Valley, a region in the San Francisco Bay Area that is home to many of the world’s biggest technology companies. In 1970, he and a man named Ted Dabney designed and marketed Computer Space, the first commercial video game. And a year later, Mr. Bushnell and Mr. Dabney co-founded Atari.

Yes, Atari—the company responsible for classic video games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man. Atari started simply, with a 1972 worldwide sensation known as Pong. You’ve probably seen the game—it has a paddle on the left side, a paddle on the right side, and a “ball” moves back and forth on the TV screen. The object is not to let the ball get by your paddle. While it might not seem like much of a game, in the early 1970s, Pong was all the rage—first in arcades, and then in at-home versions. It’s now on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

The Pong at-home machine only played that one basic game. Mr. Bushnell and his team followed up with the Atari 2600, a console that accepted interchangeable game cartridges (more than 30 million consoles were sold following its 1977 introduction). Interestingly, it didn’t come with Pong.

Mr. Bushnell not only developed video consoles and games—including Centipede and Asteroids—but he also mentored and helped launch the careers of some of the biggest names in the tech industry. Ever hear of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the men behind Apple? Before starting that company, they both worked for Mr. Bushnell, and they are credited with creating the Atari game, Breakout. (Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak later offered to sell a one-third share of Apple to Mr. Bushnell for $50,000. He turned them down, and today, that stake would be worth over $330 billion.)

After selling Atari to Warner Communications, Mr. Bushnell worked in other areas of electronic media. He also founded a place to play video games—Chuck E. Cheese’s. That’s right; Mr. Bushnell didn’t invent pizza, but he did dream up and open the restaurant chain where kids can have a slice… and a slice of interactive fun!

Without Mr. Bushnell’s technological wizardry, it’s quite possible that you’d be living life without a PlayStation^®, Wii^™, or Xbox console. So, the next time you play a video game, say thank you to Mr. Bushnell. (Then put the video game down and read another book!)