Nolan Bushnell (2014)

Yes, and at Chuck E. Cheese. And at all of my companies.

Many, many, many times! And yes, they loved it as much as most of the rest of America does. After I sold it, they were mad at me because they couldn't get as many free tokens as they wanted.

Not Chuck E. Cheese - just the dreaded animals from Showbiz Pizza which Chuck E. purchased in the late 80s.

Yeah. I knew that Jobs and Woz were fast friends and Woz worked days at HP. If I put Jobs on the night shift, I'd get two Steves for the price of one. A very good business proposition.

Bob Noyce, one of the founders at Intel, told me, "If you think the other guy's business is easy, it means you don't know enough about it." It's very easy to think of a business from the opportunity side when in fact there are many hard obstacles that have to be beaten to be successful.

Don't sell to big Hollywood studios. Atari had an extraordinary corporate culture that was destroyed within 2 years of the sale. I think that Atari would still be important today if that sale hadn't occurred.

The most important part of starting your first business is to right-size it. Don't start out thinking you're going to do twitter or facebook. But do something you can fund with the money that is in your wallet - get some experience with a little tiny company that you can do in your spare time. Train yourself. I've seen too many startups in which it's like they want to play in the big leagues before they played any sandlot baseball.

Not only is Go a great game, I think it's also good discipline for your brain for being an entrepreneur. In business, you need to think far ahead in playing your moves sequentially. When you play a lot of chess or Go, that makes your mind always think about strategies in a sequential way - which is very helpful.

Edit: Actually my favorite video games in the coin-op space were Tempest and Breakout - Steve Jobs worked on Breakout for me. Currently I like Portal a lot.

My life rights were optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio and they are currently in development in a movie about me. I think he'd be great to play me :) Or perhaps Liam Neeson.

I've not seen it, but I helped the people who did the movie on it and saw the movie and wished I had been there.

It's been fun working on very different projects. It keeps me from being bored. As for turning down 1/3 of Apple for 50,000 dollars, what do you think? I regret it. :(

Yes. The company was just beginning to have traction when the '08 recession hit. Because the company was still in the fragile stage, it couldn't sustain the downturn. I view it as my mistake because I chose to grow instead of cutting back, hunkering down, and waiting for the economy to rebound.

First of all, I created the technology. Most of the games were really created by my technologists. For example, even Pong was made by Al Alcorn - though I injected ideas, I feel that he was the true architect of that game. What Atari did was take a tremendous amount of care making sure that the reaction time and the difficulty was very finely tuned. And that's what makes a really good game. A really good game that is timeless.

I love public space entertainment and gameplay. I can think of about 20 things that could make a tremendous entertainment location using some of the cool technology that is just coming online. For example, I think there will be some great games coming from the platform that Google calls Project Tango. It will be too expensive for homes, but it will really rock in bars and restaurants!

I learned how to motivate kids. That skill applied to education in my estimation is a noble work. As I get older, I ask the question, "what would I like my legacy to be?" And one of the answers comes back - I would like to impact education in an extremely positive way.

In general, the people who get rich are driven by the project more than by the money. Many times in entrepreneurship, you're actually making less than minimum wage, sometimes for years. People who just want to get rich seldom have that personal discipline and therefore fail to achieve that rich goal.

Actually, to my knowledge we never had a Pong in Khartoum. The first install was in Andy Caps in Sunny Valley. Khartoum was very special however because it was owned by my wife's father and I met her when she was working there. We dated, fell in love, married, had kids, and are married to this day.

Atari was the most frightening because I was really young and dumb. And everybody in the business was bigger, had better presence in the marketplace, and had more cash. In the early days of Atari, we were totally unable to raise venture capital - so we were outgunned in every direction. Our only weapon was that were the most creative and slowly but surely that difference allowed us to secure an 85% market share.

Even though it was most frightening, I think it represented the most fun.

I consider my 8 children who are all creative, cool, and well-adjusted as both the hardest thing to accomplish and the most rewarding. In the business world, I am working on fundamentally changing the way people learn which I think will have the greatest impact of anything I've ever done.

I think that robots and entertainment will be very important in the future. I'm also very interested in businesses that will be enabled by autonomous or auto-drive cars. There will also be an interesting intersection between computers and biology. Harder tech, but important, is nanotech i.e. micromachines.

First step is really research a product plan. Know intimately the feature set. I even like to make a sell sheet as if the product already exists. Once you have that, go out and try to sell it to people - if you can, you're on the right track. If you can't, you should probably keep working on it.

I found that two-thirds of the population loved it and the last third hated it. Kids universally loved it, particularly ages 10-20. I think that adding games as well as automatic ordering will clearly be the fast food and the quick-casual structure of the future.

Breakout.

Most parts of the business I find are pretty straightforward, honest, serious people. In any business where there's a lot money, you find a few crooks. An interesting part of the game business now are the youtube channels that teach gameplay tricks and commentary. This is something very new and interesting - where it will lead, who knows. Minecraft is more fun after you take a few tutorials.

I learned from Back to the Future that if you change a little thing, everything could have changed. For example, instead of me investing, I introduced Steve to Don Valentine, who introduced Jobs to Mike Markala, who was the president of Apple in the early days and was adult supervision - that was critical for Steve.

Yeah, I attended Davis - I was a Dart!

In some ways the video games, particularly in the early days, were not actually computers. Meaning they were not von Neumann Architecture - they were digital clock-driven signal generators that were very complex. TV screens like to receive data at 3.5 MHz. Computers in those days thought they were going fast at 500 kHz. We were able to figure out a way to use basic chips to play a simple-purpose game. It wasn't until '77 that 6502 even came close to being fast enough and even then we had to design a support chip or television interface chip (codename: Stella) to get it to go fast enough.

Pong didn't have a square ball because we thought it was cool - it was just the only thing we could do.

My original dream growing up was to be an imagineer with Disney. They didn't want me at the time so I had to invent the video game.

I think that certain types of learning should be done by computers and teachers should help put that knowledge into context. The balance comes when kids are taught by projects and with coaches.

If you study the brain science on how people learn, it is very different than the classroom structure of lecture/homework/test. We have found that we can accelerate foundational knowledge by at least a factor of 10 and have the student have fun while they are learning! If we can keep students motivated and not bored, we can win this game.