Nolan Bushnell Quotes
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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.
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One of the big concerns I have is that most of the HR departments in a lot of companies are hiring away from creativity and they don't know it. For instance, they are requiring everybody to have a college degree. The most creative people I know couldn't deal with college.
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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.
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I'd love to design a school.
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All schools will end up using game metrics in the future.
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The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren't always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I've come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as 'lame.'
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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.
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'Grand Theft Auto', in its deification of antisocial behavior, is where I heap the most of my scorn.
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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.
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The game business reinvents itself every five years.
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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.
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A lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want cookie cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie cutter solutions.
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Many kids with (attention deficit disorder) have been misdiagnosed, they're actually bored with teachers, as most won't even blink at concentrating on video games for hours.
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The truly creative people tend to be outliers.
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literally thousands of people have told me over the years that they met their wife or husband playing Pong.
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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.
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I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they're being edited out of importance.
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I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.
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Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.
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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.
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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.
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I always loved both 'Breakout' and 'Asteroids' - I thought they were really good games. There was another game called 'Tempest' that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time.
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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.
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I must confess I've always had a couple of pinball machines in my home and really have enjoyed some of the old classics, like Fireball.