Nolan Bushnell Quotes

“A good interviewer is able to ferret out what the applicant is really passionate about. Ask them what they do for fun, what they're reading, try and find out if they have a life outside of work.”

“A great game is easy to learn and difficult to master.”

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

“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.”

“Being your own boss is much superior to working for the man. Including working for your father.”

“Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.”

“Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you're not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you're not going to make progress.”

“Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think: Oh, no; that'll never work. It's too different.”

“Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.”

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

“Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.”

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

“I don't feel 70. I am still looking out from 14-year-old eyes.”

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

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

“I just want the future to happen faster. I can't imagine the future without robots.”

“I never, ever, saw the evil Steve Jobs. He was always the most well-mannered and respectful guy I knew. And we got to be pretty good friends. He didn't suffer fools gladly. I guess he didn't think I was a fool.”

“I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.”

“I want to fix education in the world. As soon as I work on that, I am going to work on world hunger and then world peace.”

“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.”

“I'd love to design a school.”

“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.”

“I'm the only one who was predicting the Nintendo Wii would beat Sony's PlayStation 3.”

“I've always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.”

“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.”

“In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Learning ballroom dancing is great for your brain. But it only works for three to six months. After that, you've got all the benefit you can get, and so you have to move on to yoga, and then Tai Chi, and then bridge, always keeping on the steep part of the learning curve.”