Nolan Bushnell Author: Drew Curry July 25, 2016 Prof. David Meyers Media History and Theory
Nolan Bushnell was born in 1943 in a small town outside of Salt Lake City in Utah. Tragedy struck early in Nolan’s life when his father died when he was 15. This drove him to be a provider for his family at this young age, so he took control and ran his family’s concrete business.
“When you do something like that at a 15-year-old, you begin to believe you can do anything.”
While studying computer science at the University of Utah, Nolan discovered what is considered to be the first electronic game called Spacewar. Nolan Bushnell himself said “The game was seminal to anyone who loved computers, and for me it was transforming.�
What sat Nolan’s perspective on the game apart from that of his fellow students was his love of amusement parks. He worked at one during his college years to help pay his way through. So what was his unique perspective? It was to take a computer driven electronic game and combine it with the coin driven economics of the pinball arcades of the time.
Finally Nolan had an epiphany of how to make this dream a reality. Instead of relying on software that would run on the hardware of the computer, he would instead build hardware that performed specific task of the game. He took Spacewar, a much beloved game, and stripped out a lot of the superfluous features and made a version that was still fun but could be build at a reasonable cost. Bushnell sold this idea to Bill Nutting who already had a company called Computer Quiz and in keeping with the naming theme Nolan’s game was dubbed Computer Space.
He moved to California and started his company Atari. His first employee was a man named Al Alcorn. Wanting to see what Alcorn could do Nolan gave him the task of recreating a electronic version of Ping-Pong he had seen being demoed on a Magnavox Odyssey at a trade show. Alcon had assembled a prototype in just a few weeks and had even made improvements to the game like adding sound and variable regions to the bar that allowed the blip to bounce off indifferent directions based on where it hit the bar. Like Nolan’s original game, this new game ran completely off of hardware. Bushnell added a coin box from a pinball machine from his amusement park days and dubbed the game Pong.
Top: Nolan Bushnell with Pong Machine Top Right: Screen of Pong Bottom Right: Left to Right - Ted Debney, Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn with Pong Cabinet
Because of it’s simplicity the game soared in popularity. The average machine made about $10 a day and Pong was bringing in almost $40 a day. Nolan took all the money he had and worked with Al to build 12 more machines. It took a week to build each one and each sold for $900, turn a $620 profit on each. After Nolan was finally able to get a loan from Wells Fargo for much less than he asked, he swung into full scale production. The game was a hit and his company became on of the most desired places to work. He is also the only person to ever hire Steve Jobs, before anyone knew who he was.
While Pong served to usher in an age of the electronic game and the birth of the video game industry, Nolan did not rest after he sold Atari. He went on to found Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain which revolutionized how families enjoyed eating out was sold last year for $1.3 billion dollars.
Nolan, who would go on to form Catalyst Technologies which developed two more technologies that are essential to our life today. First is Etak, the first car navigation system that still serves as the basis for many of the GPS systems today. Second is ByVideo which was the first online ordering system and changed the face of e-commerce.
Nolan continues to innovate today and has returned to his roots by joining Spil Games to make mobile games over the next few years. With all the accomplishments, it’s hard to imagine that Nolan ever did anything wrong, but his one regret? Not taking the opportunity to own 1/3 of Apple for $50,000 when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started the company.
Resources: Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Bushnell nolanbushnell.com - http://nolanbushnell.com/bio/ PBS - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/bushnell_hi.html BBC - http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33117769 INC. - http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090401/the-gamer.html UX Sphere - http://uxsphere.com/view/nolan-bushnell-atari-chuck-e-cheese-hiring-steve-jobs-atatari/sysjq In The Black - http://intheblack.com/articles/2015/10/01/video-game-pioneer-nolan-bushnell-focuses-on-education Venture Beat - http://venturebeat.com/2016/04/28/nolan-bushnell-teams-up-with-spil-gamesto-make-mobile-games/?utm_content=buffer0d821&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter. com&utm_campaign=buffer The Innovators - Walter Isaacson