Top 35 Nolan Bushnell Quotes

I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.

I’m glad to see the casual game play coming back now on the Internet, games that aren’t violent, that aren’t complex that you can sit down and you can have some fun.

In 1980, Atari was bringing in around two billion dollars in revenue and Chuck E. Cheese’s some five hundred million. I still didn’t feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple – although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.

All schools will end up using game metrics in the future.

There are a lot of things about having money that are perceived to be cool but that aren’t. Maybe if you’re a CEO jerk who likes going coast to coast by himself in a G4, then that’s fine. But that’s not me. And it never will be.

How about keyboards in your mouth? How fast can you type with your tongue? People will think you’re just masticating, when you’re really talking to your girlfriend.

I hate ‘Mafia Wars’.

Sometimes when you hire people who have to pass a Mr. Congeniality test, you end up losing some of the non-conformists who will give you different views and perspectives.

The truly creative people tend to be outliers.

I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well.

Do I really want to do a mobile game that’s one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets.

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they’re being edited out of importance.

Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese’s were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.

Young adults love to play games and they’re thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

When I was running Atari, violence against humanoid figures was not allowed. We’d let you shoot at a tank… but we drew the line at shooting at people, with blood splattering everywhere.

Selling Atari when I did – I think that’s my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years.

‘Pong’ hit the fancy. It was sort of the perfect storm of a game which has two players highly social, a game that women could play better than a guy, and sort of an acceptance of this social nature of games in a bar.

The thing we don’t want to do is overstate the benefits, but there is all kinds of proof that exercise, both physical and mental, increases brain activity.

When it kind of went to ‘Street Fighter’, where you had to push 13 buttons with all 13 of your fingers and ripped the spine out of somebody, you know, violent games lost the women. Complexity lost the casual gamer.

Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

I guess I’d like to be known for being an innovator, fostering creativity, thinking outside the box. You know, keeping people playful.

I think ‘Something Ventured’ is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way.

We didn’t do a square ball in ‘Pong’ because we thought it was cool. We did it because that was all we could do.

I’ve always been a tech-head.

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don’t get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.

Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, ‘Oh, no; that’ll never work. It’s too different.’

In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory – and I think it’s pretty well borne out – is that in the ’80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer.

I basically look at PR as something you do if there’s an object in mind. But my ego doesn’t need it.

Atari showed that young people could start big companies. Without that example it would have been harder for Jobs and Bill Gates, and people who came after them, to do what they did.

These days when you say ‘videogame’, people think of immersive games that take over your life and require three thumbs to control. My goal is to create games that almost retreat into the background. I’m interested in bringing them back to their role as a social facilitator, the way party games help people to interact.

We’re moving away from a credentialed society to a merit society.

I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.