RePlay Magazine Podcast
Welcome to the RePlay Magazine Podcast, hosted by Randy Chilton, which will share interesting bits of “coin-op” history and entertaining stories from industry greats – the visionaries, legends and characters that make the business fun!
RePlay Magazine Podcast
RePlay Magazine Podcast - Nolan Bushnell
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No doubt, you already know of Nolan Bushnell. Considered the father of the video game industry, his decades of curiosity, hustle, knowledge, creativity and entrepreneurship not only ushered in the Golden Era of the video game (Computer Space, Pong, Atari) and the family entertainment center model (Chuck E. Cheese), but had a far-reaching impact across many companies and technologies.
RePlay Podcast host Randy Chilton had the honor of chatting with the industry and tech legend, during which we learned he got started on his pretty-much-lifelong path of entrepreneurship (it started young – when he was 8!), AI and the tech’s potential impact on amusement machine and fun center operators, selling Atari, the video game crash of 1983, family life, and more. For example, did you know he led a company that developed an early computerized automobile navigation system (ETAK)? Did you know that Steve Jobs, Nolan’s former Atari employee, offered him a 1/3 share of Apple for $50,000?
There are many interviews with Nolan and articles about his story, but we learned things we didn’t know in this podcast, and suspect you will too. We greatly appreciated his generosity with his time and will certainly take him up on his offer to chat again someday. With no further ado, enjoy Randy’s chat with Nolan Bushnell.
Welcome to Replay Magazine's podcast, where we will dive into the legends of interesting stories within the world of what we call climate entertainment. Games and amusement machines you find in arcades, concentrate, bars, restaurants, and beam. Replay has covered this business for 50 years and is joining forces with industry veteran and former association president Randy Chilmer. He is Chief Revenue Officer for National Entertainment Network, owned by Japanese amusement giant Hiddleton Jimmy. And now here's Randy in this month's Replay Podcast.
SPEAKER_01So hi everybody, welcome to this month's Replay Magazine Podcast. Today we have the unbelievable honor of uh visiting with Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, the father of the video game, and so many other accomplishments throughout his uh 50 years of uh 50 years plus of uh of doing it. His his entrepreneurial spirit is uh remarkable. He spends quite a bit of time talking about it. He's just getting started, as far as I can tell, uh, with visions on how AI can impact our industry. And he's got some great stories along the way, including Steve Jobs had one job that wasn't at Apple and uh it was working for Nolan Bushnell. I did not know that. So uh he created Chuck E. Cheese, a few other uh companies along the way, about 15 to 20 of them to be exact, and he's still going strong. So we're so appreciative of him to uh carve out an hour to visit with me. And I hope you enjoy today's podcast with Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari. Welcome to the uh Replay Magazine podcast. And today we have the unbelievable honor to be visiting with Nolan Bushnell. And unless you've been living under a rock for 50 years, you've heard of him and uh his accomplishments. So, Nolan, welcome.
SPEAKER_03Good to be here. Always fun. I've been reading Replay for probably 50 years. Probably as long as it's been around.
SPEAKER_01Well, uh, we got some feedback from Mr. Adlin, the owner and publisher, and and uh apparently you were very good for business back in the day. Well, we could go over your accomplishments here, but we'd be on the uh well, we we we'd be on this uh podcast for the rest of the day. So my question is this at a very young age, you're an engineer, you grew up in Utah, or you were Utah and Utah State for a while, if I have that right. And and at some point along the line, you really, you know, you developed, you were working on Pong, you developed Atari, and then you went on to be what I can only can I can only explain as a serial entrepreneur. At what point was this path of yours apparent to you? At what age? How did this all start? How did you do this? Is kind of what I'm your accomplishments are very rare.
SPEAKER_03Well, you know, there was always this statement are entrepreneurs made or born. And uh and I've tried to ask myself that question, and uh and I'm not sure, but I think my entrepreneurship journey started when I was eight years old. And uh at dinner one night, my mother said, We've got too many strawberries, I don't know what we're gonna do with them. We had a garden out in the back, and uh, we always kind of grew vegetables and strawberries and stuff, and um the very next day I accompanied her to the grocery store, and I noticed in the produce section that they had baskets of strawberries for 50 cents. So I went home, got all the old baskets out of the garage and what have you, picked the strawberries, filled them, and sold them for 50 cents door to door. In about an hour and a half, I'd made eight dollars in a world in which my allowance per week was 25 cents. And to say the least, I was hooked.
SPEAKER_01You you made some money at eight years old, and the rest is history. Is that what you're saying?
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Yeah. And then literally, um I always from that point on, I always had some kind of a side hustle. You know, call it a gig. And um, you know, I think that um when you look at the AI that's going on right now, everybody says that the gig economy is what's going to happen in the future, much more than corporate America giving you a job.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's uh that's a great segue because you've been such a visionary and you're such a uh entrepreneur and you've done so many things. You know, I'm jumping ahead of the script, but you brought it up. AI is going to change things more than we know. And and and for this conversation, you've done so many public interviews and podcasts and whatnot. Uh, but this is going to be watched by mostly people that read replay magazine. So you're talking to your you're talking to your amusement operators, manufacturers, distributors for the for the most part. Your name probably will, I mean, Melan, there might be like 500 people see this. Which is funny because your podcasts show up in the tens of thousands every day. So it's uh uh but it's you know it's you know all podcasts are not the same.
SPEAKER_03The question is, are they the right people? And you know, that's that's kind of the question. So so if I were to give advice to amusement operators, I would say um they're they're probably more immune than you may think uh from disruption, because the amusement operator either is part of an FEC, street routes are not what they used to be, they're still distributed vending, uh not so much a distributed amusement. You know, the the home game really, really decimated the coin op. As soon as you could buy a home game that was equivalent to what you could do in the arcades, the arcades were slowly kind of shuffled aside. Uh, my son, however, does polycade. I don't know. I I think he's had a couple of ads anyway replay. And he's got this home version of some of the old Atari classics and uh Koinock classics. Like a couple of nights ago, I was playing Dig Doug for a couple of hours. I don't know if you remember Dig Doug. It was a oh hey, you know, it was a Namco game that was uh stupid in concept, but fun to play anyway.
SPEAKER_01Is that uh Brent you're referencing in the uh oh Tyler Tyler is oh Tyler. Oh Tyler is okay. Well you have eight children, right?
SPEAKER_03Yes, I do. Three girls, five boys. And all the boys are in some kind of thing with the uh with the amusement business. And uh, you know, I my youngest son made about a made over a million dollars last year publishing a game called Escape Academy. It's on yeah, it's a good game.
SPEAKER_01Well, I wonder where they get that from.
SPEAKER_03Well, they they actually said, you know, Dad, when we decided what we wanted to do for a living, it had to be something an amusement because we learned more over the dinner table than most kids had in their whole life. So whenever you have an advantage, go for it.
SPEAKER_01As I was reading, uh reading up, preparing for this uh discussion, uh it impressed me that although you're a guy that worked an unbelievable number of hours and traveled all over the world, you had a very interesting uh way to remain a good family man. And you were very intentional about the time you spent with your kids and were, like you said, at the dinner table. I believe you traveled with them internationally quite a bit. Tell me a little bit about that. How did you uh how did you work all that in?
SPEAKER_03The secret with kids is there's a lot of family time, but what is smart is one-on-one. And so how I dealt with that is I would take one of them out for breakfast every Sunday, and they'd all know whose turnip it was, and uh and at that time I would uh choose a place that was a little weird and at least a half an hour away, and so the car was kind of talk time, and then then the weird place was adventure time, you know. Like I I used to go out to the wharf and and have a breakfast place on on Sunday morning where all the fishermen were coming in and uh or the Lawrence Hall of Science, and you know, we had several universities around, and so I would kind of use that. And and then I would take kids my kids on business trip, and the rule was that when they were 10 they could go overnight with me domestically, when they were 12, they could go overnight Europe, and at 14 they got to go to Asia with me. And you know, you there's kind of these fun little things. I was taking my kids, my my son, one of my sons to to school one day, and he would had had a friend who sleeped over. And uh and the the friend asked him, I said, What was the best day of your life? And my son said, Oh, oh, that's easy. That was when I was in Tokyo with my dad. You know.
SPEAKER_01Not surprised. That's uh that's pretty remarkable that you uh were so intentional about doing that with their kids. I bet all eight of them would give a similar answer to that question.
SPEAKER_03We're all still really close now. Uh, for example, last year we did Christmas, and though they've got families of their own now, a lot of them. We all went to Barcelona, Spain. My wife rented a big house that had about 12 bedrooms. And we just had a weekend, uh week in Barcelona that was just just outside of Barcelona, and um it was great fun. Oh, I bet it was games and charades and dupe calls, all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_01I only have two kids, but uh I applaud you for figuring out just the logistics of how to get eight people at the when they're all busy and they're all working, like, okay, family, we're all eight. There's got to be one person that said can't make it dead. No, it's not like you got them all there. Yeah. Yeah, good for you.
SPEAKER_03So I'm still they know they know if they don't come, but we'll talk about them.
SPEAKER_01Oh, that's pretty good. So uh I'm I'm still fascinated on the buildup you from your eight-year-old experience. And you lost your dad at a young age at 15. And uh I think you were kind of thrust into a uh leadership role pretty abruptly there. I'd love to hear more about that and that impact in your career.
SPEAKER_03Well, I had uh two younger sisters and an older sister, and um and I knew that my mom had a little bit of a payout from uh uh from insurance policy, but I felt that any money that I took from the family would I'd be taken away from my sisters, and so I decided I was going to be financially independent, and was actually. And uh and I think again that was a part of uh my entrepreneurial road. The um, you know, I I I did this thing in college called the campus company. I was making some serious bucks. I think I was putting myself through college, driving a one a Mercedes 190 SL sports car. You know, it was it was big, and and I did it by doing the campus blotter, and that was a um great big piece of light cardboard, and I'd put a calendar of events in the middle of it, and then sell advertising all around the edge. And the economics were I'd sell about four thousand dollars worth of ads around, and it cost me $500 to print, and I'd distribute them free to the kids at the beginning of class of a quarter each quarter. And I first I did it for one university and then I did it for four. So I was making more money at the campus company than I made when I first graduated in electrical engineering. Oh my goodness. I mean, those are kind of the crazy stories, but even though I was making all that money, I decided that I needed to keep myself out of harm's way. Because summers in Utah, you could, you know, go out and chase girls and take them to dinner and spend a lot of money. So I decided I needed a nighttime job to keep myself out of trouble, and that's where I got a job at the amusement park because I could get that all all all these sales done before. And the amusement park was really more to keep me occupied. But most of my friends, several of my friends, worked at the music park. But I'd always considered it been kind of a sucker game because they paid a dollar an hour, you know, and you know, and that was I thought slave wages. But I found out that if you made quota, you got a buck and a quarter an hour, and then everything over quota, you got 10%. And I was a good salesman, and so I started making some serious buck there as well, and uh, and that's where I really learned the coin operated game business because after two years they made me manager of the department. So I was I I I call it my MBA, that um at 20 years old, I was managing a department of 150 kids, maintaining labor percentages and merchandise percentages and scheduling and hiring and training and and all that. Um my boss was a tough guy, but he was a good mentor about running business. And if I look at it, I uh I was actually running a department that did about four million dollars a summer, so that was a pretty good-sized business that I was running, uh, a division, if you would. Fast forwarded today, that's probably a more more like a $50 million business at 20 years old. So that was a um fortuitous thing. And then when I was at the university, I saw a game called Space War, which was one of the first things that um they they did on a when when when I started, computers were just all punch cards and printouts, they didn't have video screens. But then a PDP-1 came along and it had a converted radar monitor. And uh some guys from MIT programmed a game called Spacewar. I mean, I played that thing incessantly. We we'd we'd break into the computer lab at midnight and play until four in the morning. Not great for homework, but um but I decided that uh I said, boy, if I had this in my arcades at the amusement park and had a coin slot on it, people would put money in. But then you put um 25 cents for three minutes into a million-dollar computer, and the math doesn't work, yeah. So, but followed away, and then there's this theory, and and and what you want to do, whenever there's a change agent, you want to get next to the change agent. And so with AI, you don't know what all the things that AI is going to disrupt, but if you really understand AI better than anybody else, you'll be the first to see the changes and to be able to capitalize on. Well, I felt the same way in the 70s. When I graduated from the University of Utah, I decided that the change agent was semiconductors. And there was only one place in the world to be, and that was Silicon Valley. And so when I graduated, I packed up my wife. I was married then. My wife and my car, and we went to Silicon Valley and set up shop.
SPEAKER_01So let's go back to uh AI and the amusement industry. We all know it's going to change it remarkably over the next years, but I can't really connect the dots. I'm an AI user, but I ask it, what's the weather tomorrow? I mean, I'm not I'm not asking it the hard questions here. How is this going to impact the amusement industry as we know it today going forward? AI is really about crunchy data.
SPEAKER_03And so what does the amusement park, what does the amusement field know? What's their database? Well, they have locations, and then they have income in various places, and placement. Like in an FEC, you can change the revenue of something by where you place a game. You'll have a slightly different clientele, demographically, age-wise, you know, uh gender-wise, and certain games you'll be able to optimize based on the data. The AI will be able to crunch all that data and say, okay, you need more games that are structural or or um fantasy. Your game room is too old for your clientele. You need to make simpler shorter games because a lot of your money is coming from kids that are not as big as adults. You've got six games that are not returning their capital on investment as well as it should. Trade them out. You could even say do things like put in the data of what the use market is, and uh then it will alert you at when the right time to slot something out. I would be willing to bet that the proper use of AI in an FEC could change the revenue on the upside by 15 to 20 percent, and that's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. I mean, does that make sense to you?
SPEAKER_01It's how I well when you explain it, it makes perfect sense. Um, but that hadn't uh been something I was thinking about. But you're right, if you it'll just tell you anything. So you're talking about placement and driving revenue in the family entertainment centers and how it can help you make better decisions. So um I hope I bet that's a popular part of this podcast. I think you'll help a lot of people out just by talking about that. Cool. Uh I want to go back to uh well, one question I had as I was doing my research. So you you you founded Atari in 1972. The the the stories are legendary. I'm not going to make you go back and retell that whole story. Although if you Want to throw in a Steve Jobs anecdote or two? That would be fine. Um, but you you you sold it to Warner in night communications in 1976. As you look back on that four-year run and and the sale to Warner Communications, was that the right move at the time? Was should you have held on to it? Should you have sold it earlier? What how do you look at that time period in your life and the and the decisions you made regarding Atari? Economically, it was wrong.
SPEAKER_03I think I could have pulled through um the introduction of the VCS, the the cartridge program home game. Needed more capital than I had. But I think I could have skinny it. I wouldn't have optimized it, but I think I could have survived it. And of course, it turned into a billion-dollar business. And Warren screwed it up, and basically, I'd like to say it, it wasn't homicide, it was suicide. In 83, it basically, you know, went dead and passed the leadership of the industry to the Japanese. And I don't think I would have made that mistake. Now, climbing on the other side on Back to the Future, what the sale did for me was kind of I've often said I would have not sold if I'd have just taken a little bit of time off. But I was tired because it Atari was a scramble. We never had enough capital. And so I was always chasing cash flow. And the sale to Warner allowed me to just relax a little bit and to fix my personal life. And so I had I had gone through what I call the Atari divorce. And that's when I was able to woo and wed my current wife. My she makes it, she gets angry when I say my current wife.
SPEAKER_01Well, I I I can help you with that.
SPEAKER_03But anyway, um, and so uh I got married again in in 1977, so it was just really a year after the sale. Because I kind of, you know, I was I was more ready to have a home life as well as a work life.
SPEAKER_01Challenge of an entrepreneur. You were uh so you were just tired, and uh that's really kind of was a major factor in your in your sale to uh water. Yeah. You said in one one of your interviews, if you would have just taken a vacation, you probably wouldn't have sold it. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_03And and you know, when you're offered uh one part of it was 15 million bucks. When you're kind of a pay seed from Utah, 15 million say, I don't need any more money than that. Good.
SPEAKER_01Especially back then. I mean, that's exactly it's a lot of money in today's money. There's a lot of money back then for sure. Well, but you went on to uh um well, I want to part, I want to I want to pause there a minute and uh continue talking about Atari because you can't talk about your story without the fact that Steve Jobs had one job in his life other than Apple, and it was working for you. How did that come about?
SPEAKER_03My attitude was always that you wanted to create a company that people wanted to work for, and we did that with Atari. And jobs came and in the typical jobs fashion said, you know, I'm not leaving until you hire me. And uh he was hired. We were looking for technicians at the time. Now, Jobs wasn't a good engineer, was, but I didn't know that at the time. But um he was hired as a uh as a technician, and he was a good technician, and I got to know him, and uh I got to know Waz and uh he became kind of an important part, you know. He and Waz did did breakout for me, uh, which was a huge hit. And of course, the story is they offered me a third of Apple Computer for $50,000 that I turned down. And I actually I actually think that uh that was a good thing for them because the guy who did put the money in was Mike Markle, who came became the first president, and he was the mentor that Steve needed. Like I turned down because I didn't see think Steve could ever be a good CEO. He was too brash and impulsive. Have you done the math what that decision could have been for you? It would have played out the same way, but I'm not sure if it would have, you know. Right.
SPEAKER_01Um, so put my operator hat on here. You you created Atari and Pong was out there, and then you followed with a variety of different games. And uh and as an operator, we certainly benefited from that period of time. And then 1982 and 1983 came along, and and it all just kind of went downhill in a hurry. So you you talk about that in a lot of your podcasts. I lived through it as an operator in Kansas, and uh I'd love to. Was that just totally driven by the proliferation of the home video games, or were there other factors in play?
SPEAKER_03It's actually an interesting question. My gut says that the 83 crash was just sort of everybody pushed a little bit too hard. It was also a thing that the the business had had become a lot more singular. Like what happened is generalized games attracted generalized consumers, and then the punch kick fight games came along that were violent and complex, and they had the continuation feature. That did two things that that took it from being an every person's game where we had as many women playing games as men, the punch-hit fight games tended to be male, tend to be young, and tend to be intense. So the people who had the punch hit fight games were making a lot of money, but it was a very narrow group, maybe 10% of the population instead of 60. And those people were intense, and they tended to be on the home side a significant part, and so when the the home business kind of imploded, their revenue stream was diverted away and the whole business crashed, but it was it was because it had hollowed out and became a fragile, the coin op side became fragile. Now, you might notice that Chuck E. Cheese was not negative negatively affected at that time because it had you know it had games that everybody wanted, and uh and the demographic didn't change, it was family with kids.
SPEAKER_01And you started Chuck E. Cheese in 1977, correct. Probably also the fact that uh the consumer experience was unique in Chuck E. Cheese with all the interactive games and the animation combination with the food.
SPEAKER_03So uh Chucky Cheese was kind of the a mix between an arcade and the and an amusement park midway. Where we had Steve Alls and what have you, you know.
SPEAKER_01Chuck E. Cheese, you you invented the FEC with Chuck E. Cheese. Is that a fair statement? I think so, actually, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Are you surprised with uh the population? I I you know I should take that back a little bit. I was contemporary with Dave and Buster's, right? But they had a slightly different model and were growing at a much slower rate than the Chucky did.
SPEAKER_01Are you surprised with how the uh that model really continues to evolve even today? I mean, family fund centers are uh you know in the right place with the uh right equipment, exactly diversified, are more popular than ever, even today.
SPEAKER_03Well, I think that um that continues to be the case. In fact, I'm kind of working on a thing right now, and I'm calling the arcade the museum of games, and uh I think that there's a new thing going on, and what I'm planning to do is get a a mall location, fill it up with some classic games and some weird games and what have you, and just pay one price, all you can play and stay as long as you want. Because there's there's an interesting thing about the museum business right now, it's actually kind of one of those growth factors where uh you get 10,000 feet, fill it up with weird shit, and charge an advanced mission. And um there's actually a very, very, very good one called Activate. I don't know if they have one in your area, but there's one here in LA, and I think they've got 30 or 40 of them around the state, uh states, but it's got a very, very, very good gaming environment. It's a physicality, and then we have VR, which is coming all around, which is not going on, but it's games reimagined um in some ways. So will people always be gaming of sorts? Yeah, I think so. We just have to figure out what the new thing to dazzle in.
SPEAKER_01Well, we all learned uh coming out of COVID that uh humans' desire to socialize with other humans is greater than uh I think most of us knew. Would you agree with that?
SPEAKER_03No question.
SPEAKER_01We were all locked up for a while, and uh man, when they got the ghost side to go back out, they came back out and droves. Every every operator and distributor manufacturer had a went from having a revenue problem to having a supply chain problem because it uh came back so fast and softened up a little bit, but well, thank goodness.
SPEAKER_03It's interesting, COVID was a singularity, like the world changed after COVID. And uh like before COVID, I was getting on airplanes all the time. Now I almost never do for business. We're doing this, we're doing you know, Zoom and and and all that. You go through downtown sections, and remote working is a very important part. We have some places like San Francisco where the downtown area has a 60% vacancy rate, you know, and so the whole when you have whole sectors of the economy built out that's not necessary. I have one company that I'm working with right now that um my CEO is in Los Angeles, my CFO is in Istanbul, my CMO is in Stockholm, Sweden. That takes remote working to a next level. I know, but um, they're all really good at what they do, and um like I'm paying 100 grand a year to a engineer in Istanbul that if he were in Silicon Valley, I'd have to be paying him a quarter of a million, and he's happy as a pig in shit because the dollar versus the Drakman or the Real, I don't I don't remember what there is, but the the Turkey economy is inflationary as heck, and the dollar just goes, you know, he's living like a king.
SPEAKER_01Well, tell me what uh, you know, you're you are you are certainly young at heart and have are full of energy and can tell that you've uh you know you're you're far from done here. What's uh what's next for uh Nolan Bushnell? What are you gonna do over the next five, 10 years?
SPEAKER_03Well, I think that uh on my bucket list, I've got a couple of companies. Like I'm saying, I'm doing these museum kind of things. So but um I'm also planning to live in Italy for about six months, just kind of to hang out. And uh I think I'm going to I continue to do speeches, you know. Somehow they they love me in Brazil, so I go to I I go to the Brazil, you know, game convention every year and and uh give them ideas.
SPEAKER_01One of the questions we always always ask, you know, they we've had a lot of people on this podcast that have achieved so much uh over their careers and really changed the industry. But if you look back over it, is there is there a decision, is there a time in your life where you'd say, man, I would have done that differently. What's your what's your do-over in your career?
SPEAKER_03I I think it's impossible to be in this business and not think about do-overs. Um and and a lot of times, what um like I was so wrong on so many things. Like I thought kids absolutely needed tokens. You know, because they were tangible and what have you. And even when Las Vegas went over to an all-paper thing for their song machines, I didn't think that would ever work for Chuck and Cheese. And it does. Which was really surprising to me.
SPEAKER_01Uh it was a big shift for sure, especially when you had the machines dispensing all the tickets, and that seemed to be such a part of the experience. That's just on your card. Kids don't care, they prefer the card. Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Anything else come to mind? I think that um the part that I didn't see was how important the phone and games on the phone were going to be. Right. Didn't see it coming.
SPEAKER_01Steve Jobs saw it coming. That's uh it's unbelievable that you know you see a guy pandering on the street corner and he's stopping every couple of minutes to check his phone. I mean, everybody has yeah, everybody has a phone. So you've been recognized by BAFTA. You were you were a you're an initial uh Hall of Fame inductee into the uh amusement industry hall of fame back in the day. Did I get that correct? Correct. I think you uh think you went in with Eddie Adlum and a couple of other guys. Absolutely. And he specifically said, uh, well, I don't know if you saw his. We we we we talked to him a couple of months ago, but uh he said Nolan Buschdown was very good for subscriptions and to thank you for uh providing him a lifestyle he didn't anticipate. Because you brought all these people into the industry making video games, they all subscribe to Replay Magazine. So he said, be sure and thank Nolan.
SPEAKER_03Well, I thank Eddie because he's always been a friend, and uh, you know, I got to know him and his family a little bit. And uh he have he has a beautiful daughter. I I forget what what her name was. Is she still involved at all?
SPEAKER_02Uh I believe so, yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Ingrid. Yep, yeah. Ingrid. I don't know if you spent uh East Oddgrass said to tell you hello as well. She she worked with Nancy, put this together. She's uh her and I kind of kind of do this together. She uh she helps me, helps me along. When I look over the companies that you started and sold and moved on, it's just quite amazing. I the your your your buy video uh story, which was a precursor to Amazon before Amazon, you were Amazon before it even existed. Is that a good way to describe that?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, see the problem I saw online shopping as being something that was important. The problem is that that at that time the internet was just at the beginning, and so the idea of broadband internet wasn't there, it was just 300 wad and modems, right? You know, where it takes a day and a half to download a picture, you're not gonna have Amazon very well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, good point. Then you you uh a company called ETAC, which was the precursor to the modern GPS. So all of us that use GPS, thank you for that.
SPEAKER_03I I actually made a lot of money on that. I sold that.
SPEAKER_01I think I sold that for a couple million bucks. Well, Chat GPT says you sold it to News Corp in 1989 for 25 million dollars. Yeah. What if you hadn't created Hong and what if you hadn't created the video game? Somebody else would have come along and done that, or how do you think that would have played out?
SPEAKER_03Well, I often believe that what I did, the technology that I created was was before the microprocessor. And I believe that the microprocessors got to be good enough about 68 that somebody would have done a video game in 68. So I believe that I that the technology I did, which was kind of unique and you know, it was kind of out-of-the-box thinking, let it start in 71 with computer space and then 72 with Atari. You know, my first game was computer space that was that I licensed to nutting. And uh and I think that uh it's highly probable that the video game wouldn't have started before 78.
SPEAKER_01Because just because of the advent of the technology would have made it more apparent.
SPEAKER_03Every year it got better because video takes data at a really, really high rate. And uh the first games that were being played on a computer were actually vector monitors, which consume data at a much slower rate than raster scan. But in order to do it cheap, I had to do it on a raster scan because you could buy raster scan TV for a hundred bucks, which made it scalable, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You tried to sell it, you do I have the story right when you came up with the idea for Atari and the Pong, you you had a hard time taking it to market. You you went to a few places and then said to heck with it, we're just gonna build our own.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, but but you know, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Oh, very true, very true. Slowly but surely, I was able to build the company, build the capability. In four years, we had an 80% market share. Now that's not easy to do because I did it without capital. So, you know, and uh but I was I think I had an advantage. That I played business like a game. I was I was always a you know I was a 2100 ranked amateur chess player at the time. And uh chess teaches you to think ahead, to anticipate moves and counter moves. And if you apply that to business pretty soon, and if the other guy isn't, you can always beat him. You don't have to beat them by much, just a little bit every day. Just a little bit. You get a little bit stronger, they get a little bit weaker.
SPEAKER_01I think that's great, great observation, great advice for all of us. I'll go home and practice on my chess game.
SPEAKER_03One thing that I'm very proud of is that I think I created the ethos of Silicon Valley that made it as successful as it was. And that ethos was focus on outcome, not process. And so we started out kind of having a dress down Friday, and then we had dress down anytime, and then we said we're gonna treat everybody by like adults, and uh we're not gonna have time clocks, and we don't care when you come, we don't care if you come to work, the only thing that matters is outcomes. If you want to work from home, achieve the outcome, go ahead.
SPEAKER_01Certainly, uh certainly seems to be the case. So you're the reason we have a foosball table in the break room. Yeah, exactly. Anything you want to say to your uh faithful replay uh readers before we uh give you back your day?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, just guys, you know, keep reading. Replay always has some fun stuff, and uh believe it or not, there's some gossip in there too, which is always fun because you know the coin up business, unlike a lot of businesses, it has a sense of community that a lot of businesses don't have, and uh but I think that's special.
SPEAKER_01Well, it's true. When you uh when you look at why I wonder if anybody had been doing this for 30 or 40 or 50 years in the industry, uh that's actually a pretty long list. It is, absolutely. Yeah. Well, uh, Nolan, this has been an honor. I thank you for uh taking the time out of your schedule and uh you know just sharing with us some of your experience, some of your wisdom. And uh I think it's uh I thought it was just great. So I really appreciate your time and uh and and it's and your comments.
SPEAKER_03Well, we'll have some fun again. So probably ring me up again in a couple of years, and I'll have some new ideas on AB on AI.
SPEAKER_01I know you will. I know you will. Well, it's been a pleasure. I really appreciate your time. Be good.
SPEAKER_02Thanks. Okay, thank you. I I got it. I I gotta give you one one thing. Oh, good, good, good. This is my current book.
SPEAKER_01Oh, your current book, Shaping the Future of Education. Yep. Yeah, I I had written down both your books because you did a you did a finding the next Steve Jobs is another one, right? Yeah. Okay, let's talk about shaping the future of education. I want to hear about this.
SPEAKER_03Well, it just is a my rule is you can't complain about something unless you have a plan to fix it. And I just think that that education in the world, it's not just the US, is woefully inadic inadequate, and uh inefficient. And I've got a it's it's the book is formulaic as to how we fix it.
SPEAKER_01So enough said, and that's available on Amazon.com. I just saw it a little bit earlier. Good. Yeah, so I I had to leave with one commercial anyway. Absolutely. Well, that's uh least we can do for you giving us your time. Well, you take care, uh, and I uh hope to see you at trade shows or around, or yeah. Maybe maybe I will maybe we will do a sequel. We'll see. Okay, bye. Thank you, sir. Bye bye.
SPEAKER_02Game over.