COVER STORY
THE IBI INTERVIEW Photo by Grettel Cortes
By Robert Sax
GAME PIONEER NOLAN BUSHNELL IS KEEPING IT REAL, VIRTUALLY.
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o give you an idea of how influential Nolan Bushnell has been in digital entertainment, Apple co-founder Steven Jobs once worked for him. An engineer, technology pioneer and entrepreneur, Bushnell is best known as the founder of Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater. He has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame and was named one of Newsweek’s “50 Men That Changed America.” Nolan recently visited the IBI office for a wide-ranging conversation about innovation, the future of location-based entertainment, the VR revival of Pong, and how to get that second quarter. Among his many current projects he is co-founder and chairman of Modal Systems, Inc., a virtual reality entertainment company started with Jason Crawford, an inventor and designer of interactive experiences.
We started off with a simple question:
IBI: How do you become a visionary? Nolan Bushnell: I think for me it’s always asking the question, ‘What is the kind of world I want to live in?’ I read a lot of science fiction. While some of it is post-apocalyptic, a lot of it is also aspirational in that a lot of the things are really cooler than today. I like to design things for myself. That is, games I want to play, projects I want to do, what have you. 26
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I think that the first step to anything is you have to say, ‘What do I want to fix?’ It can be as simple as, ‘I want to fix my boredom.’ Entertainment is driven by novelty as much as anything else. A second driver is mastery. Sometimes people just feel good when they’re able to master something. Whether it be knocking all the pins down with one ball or being able to run the table on a game of 8-ball.
COVER STORY IBI: When you were developing your early games at Atari, was that
something that you were thinking about? How do we get people through levels, or provide a sense of accomplishment and mastery?
that better than anything. It is this side of [Star Trek’s] holodeck, but in time we will approach the holodeck experience.
NB: When I first started, it was much simpler than that. How do I present
IBI: What is it about slipping into a different reality
these simulations that had never been done before in a compelling way? The first stage of development of Atari and of the games that we had was really articulating, on our cheap platform, things that I’d been doing on the big computers at the University of Utah. And then, as we got into the business more we started asking the question, ‘How do I get these games to earn more money?’ In the coin-op world, we were always fighting between a satisfying game experience and keeping the game to an average of three minutes, because that’s what you had to do in order to keep the revenue coming. That became a driver and we got more sophisticated and we figured out what people like to do and how we get the first quarter and how do we get the nth quarter. Often times, it was easy to get the first quarter and harder to get the second. Sometimes it was really hard to get.
IBI: What were some of the challenges in getting the first quarter? NB: Easy to use, intuitive. In the coin-op world, you have to think about simple. In the FEC space, you have to be simple. People won’t read instructions. They have to be able to drop their coin and be in the game immediately and know pretty much what’s going on. Occasionally, a game is not that intuitive. In the arcade, there were some games where people would cluster around somebody that was already playing and say, ‘Oh man, that’s cool.’ They would learn by watching. Whereas, if it was just stand-alone in a bar somewhere, sometimes it would have a harder time getting that following. Then there’s this whole idea of diversity of players. Is this [game] appropriate for an eight-year-old? Is it appropriate for a twenty-year-old? Are there things that allow you to bridge that gap? Today, there are a whole bunch of games that I think are inappropriate for ten-year-olds.
that people find so seductive?
NB: It’s about fantasy and role-playing. When you are playing Call of Duty or League of Legends, all of a sudden you are a mythical creature. Video game worlds are also satisfying because they’re understandable. They operate under a predictable set of rules. Life is pretty messy. There’s a lot of chaos, there’s a lot of things that don’t make sense. You’re surrounded by really stupid people sometimes. Therefore, life is somewhat unpredictable, whereas synthetic worlds are quite predictable.
IBI: So predictability in a game is something that’s very important. What role does storytelling or content play in the attractiveness of a game?
NB: I think that it can be important, and sometimes it’s not important at all. Not much of a story in Tetris, but it was a very satisfying game. I think story is part of this permission to believe in this alternative reality. Story in a game is frosting, but it’s definitely not the main course. The main course is the game play, the structure, the rules, what have you.
IBI: In the FEC industry, traditional games and
IBI: Because of content or play?
activities like bowling continue to play a big part. These have a set of rules and predictability. When you’re getting into something that’s expanded like virtual reality, what carries over from bowling?
NB: Content, primarily. I’ve never been a big fan of Grand Theft Auto.
NB: With bowling, the primary driver is mastery and
I feel like it celebrates the baser side of life, and I don’t think we need to celebrate that. Unfortunately, you can always make a buck with a race to the bottom.
Nolan featured in an ad for Atari.
competition. You feel good when you bowl a 240, or
IBI: How do you go about changing or disrupting an industry? That’s something that you’ve done several times in different industries.
NB: I call it creating access points. Whenever you do something different or extremely new, it’s as much teaching the public about this new thing as it is about anything else. You also want to assert that this is really a cool thing to do and that you will be rewarded intellectually, adventure-wise. Remember, entertainment is really about synthetic experiences in many instances. VR in some ways does IBI
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COVER STORY NB: I think that what is always the question is right
Nolan at Chuck E. Cheese.
190 in my case. I’m happy as a pig in muck with 190, which breaks out of my normal 130 kind of world. I think that all of these activities are important. I’m doing a lot of work in e-sports. E-sports are kind of interesting because if you’re a five-foot two-inch, 94-pound woman, you know you’re never going to play in the NFL. All of a sudden, with e-sports, you can develop skills and all of a sudden, you can become a star. The same thing goes with someone who may have a handicap. I was just at a game convention in São Paolo, Brazil. One of the star players down there is a paraplegic. I love the fact that this is open to physical, gender, and age diversity. It may become one of the most inclusive activities man has ever developed.
IBI: Do you think that e-sports are going to become an important component of a family entertainment center?
NB: Absolutely. I think that e-sports will become, in time, more important than the NFL and the NBA.
IBI: And by that you mean large numbers of people actually preferring to watch e-sports competitions than the NFL and NBA?
timing. It’s one thing to be right in the long-term, but you gotta make money next month. Initially there become parishes, then, ultimately, there will be the cathedral built. I think that the FECs will become the parishes of e-sports, once they have in their jurisdiction a sufficient number of players. When it comes to virtual reality, the virtual reality environment will begin to drive more and more of the entertainment. I think that virtual reality gives you the opportunity of having a more compelling experience because you are immersed in a very new and important way. I can’t imagine playing Pong on a two-dimensional screen, but I just get a real kick out of playing Pong in virtual reality. Editor’s note: Pong, the first video game from Bushnell’s Atari, became a classic. It has returned as one of Modal’s first games.
IBI: Does it fascinate you that Pong has come around again? Or that you’ve found a way to make it relevant again?
NB: Jason did the Pong game as a joke on me! I don’t think we ever expected it to be a commercial product. Which in some ways is déjà vu all over again because Pong, when we developed it [at Atari], we didn’t think it was gonna be a commercial product. It was a training thing.
NB: E-sports will have higher viewership. It’ll generate more ad revenue,
At this point Jason Crawford, co-founder of Modal, joined the discussion.
and ultimately, more ticket sales.
JC: While we were working on an e-sports
IBI: What are some of the reasons you think that? NB: Fans of a sport are created by players of that sport. If you look at people who are the most rabid [football] fans, they were the people who were the high school football captain, perhaps played intramural in college or on the college team. They become the fans because they appreciate the nuance of extremely capable players. They celebrate that capability. There are more people now playing video games than playing football. With the brain injuries in football, I expect that Pop Warner will go away, probably high school football will go away, within the next ten years. I think that that will cut off the feed stock of [pro football.] People will still want to be fans and so they will be attracted to the games that they know, and will celebrate the nuance.
IBI: With the advent of e-sports and virtual reality, what should today’s
FEC operator understand about customers who are interested in these new forms of entertainment? 30
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prototype called Mythic Combat, we whipped up Nolan and Jason Crawford.
COVER STORY Pong. [When Nolan tried it] he thought that he was getting in to Mythic Combat. He was like, ‘Wait a second, I’m in Pong!’ But the funny thing about it, like Nolan is saying, is that thing does really well. It earns.
average place. What we’ve spent a lot of time working on is to figure out how to make money. We don’t know if the [VR] industry at large will make money. We hope it does.
NB: There’s a very interesting thing in games, you can almost quantify the amount of money it’ll make based on the smiles people get out of it. People just get a kick out of it. You get 24-karat smiles out of everybody that plays the game.
NB: We see this as much as a software-as-a-service
IBI: Nolan, you’ve been through what I would say are some of the
early iterations of the family entertainment center business. Is it fair to say that Chuck E. Cheese was a family entertainment center?
NB: No question about it. We were really focused on bringing younger kids into the video game fold.
IBI: What are some of the early lessons learned from Chuck E. Cheese about how to put together food and entertainment and games and all of those pieces we now know as an FEC?
NB: I think that the first thing that you learn is that it’s important to have a diversity of offerings. The three-year-old wants something very, very different than the eight-year-old, and different again than the twelve-year-old. It’s not one size fits all.
IBI: Does Chuck E. Cheese’s recent retirement of the iconic Pizza Time Players animatronic band say something about where the family entertainment center concept is going?
NB: I don’t know. I think they’re taking a huge risk myself. Who knows? They’ve probably done all kinds of focus groups, but let me tell you the thing that’s scary about focus groups: they lie. [At Chuck E. Cheese] when we did a focus group [or] surveys, the people who were filling it out were the adults. They were saying they wanted it to be quieter, they wanted spicier pizza. You have to keep your eyes clearly on who the driver of your customer is. It’s the kids not the adults. You could give the best pizza in the world, and adults wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s go to Chuck E. Cheese today!’
IBI: To segue into virtual reality, why does it appear that this is
the next big thing in location-based entertainment?
JC: The whole market is still evolving. I think it will become a big money maker. When Nolan got involved with the company, I was wrapped up in the technology. Nolan took his Atari and Chuck E. Cheese mentality and said, ‘Nope, we need to make this cheap, and we need to make it portable.’ He came in and said ‘This has to make dollars and cents. It has to be practical.’
NB: To a chain. JC: Everything that we’ve worked on over the last few years is to make [VR] a profitable thing. And not just for the Disneys and Universals, but for a bowling center, for an 32
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business as we do any kind of a hardware one. Our intention is to be a partner and make sure that our customers make money 365 days a year. Not just this year, but next year and the year after.
JC: You have all the technology, you have all this cool stuff, but at the end of the day, you’ve got square footage. You have to make a certain amount of money. All this fancy technology, okay, so what? It needs to be formatted in a consumable way for the end user, quick.
NB: And you have to be able to operate the system with an untrained, stoned teenager.
IBI: So is it going to be no more complicated than running a laser tag attraction?
NB: Easier. JC: Most FECs are staffed a lot with kids and part-time high school kids and college kids. Most people are not technically inclined. That’s not really a technology challenge, that is a design challenge. You have to make it so that the second you pick it up, it’s intuitive enough to where it’s literally like just push that button. We have this thing called the Modal command center, which runs the whole system. It’s a tablet, and it’s very, very, very simple.
NB: We’ve watched the kids who run it, and we know what they’ve stumbled on and we’ve fixed it. It’s at the point where I’d say that we can hand it off 90 percent of the time with zero instructions.
JC: If you know how to use an app on a phone, you can run the Modal system. It’s just that easy. That took a while too; we’ve done so much testing over the last few years. Nolan shows off his creation, Pong.
COVER STORY go somewhere and set it up at a commercial location and run it and learn. A lot of it has had nothing to do with technology, but just learning about what makes sense and getting that business model to work for the FECs.
IBI: So what is the business model for your system? JC: There are two options for Modal. We’ve given people the option, if they qualify, to do a partnership where we revenue share. We actually like that a little better but we do understand that much of the industry is driven by straight budget, where I have this much money to spend on new attractions this year that will bring in x amount of people and will take up x amount of space. A lot of places, they don’t mind putting the capital up for an attraction if it can get a reasonable return on investment.
NB: We’re driving for six months. JC: Our first system that we’re selling now, from what we’ve seen, is definitely under a year ROI for even a challenged location. We’ve been analyzing all this information for some time. With the affordability of our system, it allows the magic of free-roam VR at an affordable price point. We’re talking five dollar tickets.
Nolan on set at Modal developing his latest game.
NB: And it depends on content. IBI: Do you think the VR technology could get to a point
where the in-home experience would compete with location-based VR?
JC: I think that in any emerging platform that will happen. NB: But I think less so here because, first of all, there’s what I’d call the seated VR experience. That’s appropriate for home. The free-roaming, it’s a little bit harder. I think that VR free-roaming will be a special place that is probably gonna have a 20-year life.
JC: With the free-roam, a big component of what we’re trying to do is to make it social. One of the reasons you come and you bowl is because it’s family, friends, it’s a fun social activity. All the things that we make, we make sure that we check off the social component. IBI: There are quite a few companies out there trying
to succeed with VR entertainment. Can they all survive?
Nolan with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Jason Crawford.
IBI: How long is the game experience for five dollars? JC: It depends on what you’re doing. Every product we make has to be fun and magical, but it also has to have crazy high throughput. We have some interesting ways of handling time. If someone wants to charge $20, and have the person in there for 15 minutes, or somebody wants to charge $5 and have them in there for three minutes, we’re trying to offer products that allow flexibility for the operator. IBI: Are you seeing a certain sweet spot at this point or is it too early to tell?
NB: It feels like three minutes. JC: Yeah. Three to five minutes. This will change over time, obviously. 34
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NB: People always ask us about competition. My belief right now is that there is no competition, that we’re all linked arms, creating this new world. Zero Latency and the Void, they’re kind of the equivalent of a tent-pole movie. It’s expensive. It’s good. They’ve spent a lot of money and that’s good for the business because I think we need that. The only thing I’m worried about is that I don’t want anyone to get into a VR experience that’s unpleasant to them. As long as everybody leaves smiling, we’ve got a good industry. ❖
Robert Sax is a writer and PR consultant in Los Angeles. He grew up in Toronto, Canada, the home of five-pin bowling.