Atarian Magazine: ISSUE 1 MAY/JUNE 1989
INTERVIEW

NOLAN BUSHNELL: FATHER OF VIDEO GAMES
It is fitting that the first person we introduce to Atarian readers should be Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and the man who has been dubbed the Father of Video Games.

Bushnell founded Atari in 1972 and helped to turn it into the fastest growing company in the U.S. He sold the company to Warner Communications in 1976, stayed on until 1978, and in 1983 founded Axlon, which designs and develops games and toys.

Bushnell, currently chairman of Axlon, recently signed an agreement to design and develop video games on an exclusive basis for Atari's 2600 and 7800 video game systems. We talked with Nolan about a wide variety of issues ranging from his initial involvement with games to his recent decision to renew his association with Atari.

Atarian: How do you feel about working with Atari again?
Bushnell: I'm thrilled to be back in the video game saddle. I think I have a lot to offer today's gamers, and I'm especially glad to have this opportunity to work with the great game development team at Atari.

What do you see as the state of the video game industry today?
It is booming again. After becoming saturated in the early 80's as avid gamers overdosed on a bunch of "me too" games, U.S. sales of video games have doubled in each of the last three years.

Video games are not a fad—here today, gone tomorrow—but are a unique form of entertainment. Unlike watching TV or a movie, video games are totally involving mentally and, even to some extent, physically.

You said people got tired of "me too" games. What are the characteristics of a good game?
Easy to learn, difficult to master. If you look at all the successful games since the start of the industry, I would guess that 99% of them follow this simple rule.

I have three sons—ages 6, 8, and 10—and we play a lot of games together. Watching what they, as well as older game enthusiasts, come back to over and over is the best way of telling which games are good and which ones aren't.

Today, what I call "extended story/puzzle games" are what I think will be the next popular game genre. I have one of this type in the works for the 2600 now, code named The Adventures of Max. It's a fun game about a polar bear. Your objective is to descend into a pit, steal a ruby, and get back out with your life intact. Naturally, all sorts of bad stuff happens to you on the way.

You mentioned the 2600, which Atari introduced back in 1977. How can you get such complex games to run on the 2600?
First of all, we use lots more memory today. Early games like Dodge 'Em and Canyon Bomber used about 4000 bytes (4K) of memory or even less. Newer games and the ones we're working on now use as much as 64K; that's 16 times as much!

Second, we've gotten more clever in doing animation and eye-popping graphics. It takes a great deal of memory to refresh the entire screen every time a character or object moves, so we use tiny bitmaps—called sprites—of just the moving object.

Sprites have been around for a while, but now we've added other techniques like horizontal and vertical scrolling that allow us to create much more intricate and spectacular, effects.

It sounds like 2600 owners have a great deal to look forward to.
You bet. We're doing a nifty shooting game that uses a light gun called, appropriately enough, Shooting Arcade. We have another one called Motorodeo that's kind of a motor Olympics.

Then there's one called Saving Mary which I really like. It is the first game in which you rely on construction rather than destruction to save the princess.

You build towers at the base of a river gorge to keep Mary out of the water, which is constantly rising. You have an unlimited supply of building materials, but you can lose a life by either squashing Mary with a piece of building material or building so slowly that you fail to get her out of the water and she drowns. The guilt you feel is tremendous.

What do you see as the future of video games?
I think networking is an exciting possibility. What we really need is a way to have two people/two screens in conflict. You aren't going to find two video games in the same room in most homes, so what you need is a cheap game system modem. Then with a local phone call, you can connect your 2600 to another player's system or to a whole network of systems. It's cost effective, and I think it would be tremendously successful.

Many of our readers say they would like to become game designers. Do you have any recommendations for them?
Sure, take all the math and science courses you can, but don't neglect English, history, and the humanities either. Good games require more than clever programming; the extended story puzzle games I mentioned earlier are often based on historical or mythological tales and combine many diverse elements. Also, you have to be able to present your game concept effectively to managers in a company like Atari which minimally means you must be able to write and speak intelligently.

What is your background?
After earning a degree in electrical engineering in 1968, 1 worked for Ampex for several years and then for Nutting Associates, a company that made coin-op Trivia Quiz type games.

At Nutting, I worked out an electronic coin-op game called Computer Space. It was modeled on Spacewar, a game designed to be played on a $100,000 PDP-1 computer, but I found I could take the key elements and put them into a simplified coin-op version. Nutting made 1500 units, but the game was never a commercial success.

However, with the $500 in royalties I received from Computer Space, I was able to start my own company, Atari, Inc. Actually, the name Atari was third or fourth on the list of names we submitted to the State. Our first choice was Syzygy, but that was already taken by a candlemaker in Mendocino. Atari, which is the equivalent of the chess term "check" in the Japanese game of Go, wasn't one of our favorites, but it kind of grew on us.

Our first product was a coin-op game called Pong which had a flat paddle on each side of the screen and a ball that bounced between them. By turning knobs on the console, players could control the paddles and try to keep the ball in play.

We installed one of our first games in a bar in Sunnyvale on a trial basis. Two days later, the owner called us and said it wasn't working. Boy, was I worried! But when I got there I found that the coin box was so jammed with quarters that it was shorting out the mechanism. Needless to say, it was a great success.

From there on, Atari just took off. First we did coin-op games, then dedicated home games like Pong and Breakout, and, in 1977, we introduced the Atari Video Computer System, today known as the 2600.