YouSaid · the spoken record

Nolan Bushnell

lines on the record: 66
first: 2017-02-27
most recent: 2017-02-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The way to get on the airplane to come back to California, I get a call from Alcorn, who is the engineer. And they had a service call because they had put a basic pong game in a cabinet and put it in a bar. And the game became so popular that it filled up the coin box so that it couldn't take any more corners. So I think to myself, maybe I don't want Bally to have this because the math was so outstanding that the machines could literally pay for themselves, I mean, the game was earning almost $300 a week. And the total cost that we had was about $300.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it turned out to be, I thought it was going to be a throwaway. There was just a training program. And it just turned out to be fun. We were staying after work to play the damn game. And then I get the idea Maybe Bally wants this game. Bally, who's also a big coin operated game player out of Chicago. And so I get in the airplane, fly to Chicago. I have a little mock-up that I can, a portable unit. And I show it to them, and they don't like it. Because it's a two player game. And the coin-operated world doesn't allow for a two-player game if there's not a one-player game at that time. That was sort of written in stone somewhere in the annals of Coin Opt. Worlds. And I'm kind of dejected.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, then came allyl corn, which was our first technical employee, because we were growing and we needed to get some more talent. And I gave him a simplest game I could think of, which was a ping pong type game. When you think you're going to be in the coin-operated video game, you write down every sport you can think of. Every construct, and ping pong was one of them. And he went off and he basically had the thing working in one or two weeks. I mean, it was really quick”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, this was also at the time when venture capital was just getting started. And so Ted put in two hundred fifty dollars. I put in $250, and that's all the money that went into Atari.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put it in a bar Called the Dutch Goose. It was in Menlo Park and was right next to Stanford University. The game was a smash hit at the Dutch goose. I licensed the game to a company called Nutting Associates and realized that it did really well in college campuses, so I mean, it sold a couple of million dollars in units, which was to me a big hit, but to the industry was kind of a mediocre flop. But I had a 5% royalty, and so that was $100,000, which was a massive amount of money. Put this in context. I came to work at Ampex for $825 a month as an associate engineer.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My office mate was a guy named Ted Dabney. This was at AMPEX, and I said, I'm going to start a company. Form a partnership. We had this computer and the computer was mind-numbingly slow. And in order to make the economics work, the computer cost like $5,000. Coin operated games at the time needed to be less than $1,500. So, the way I was going to do it is I was going to timeshare that one computer across three screens with three coin slots, and I felt that I could get the $1,500 that way.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It started out a little bit as a research project, and then I said, yeah, I'm going to start something. And in fact, it was almost prescient that when I was driving down the Sierra's towards Silicon Valley, I told my wife, I said, you know, in two years I'm going to start my own company. I just knew that that was kind of on my trajectory. I didn't know at that time it was going to be a video game company. I just thought I'd do it. And in the back of my mind, and I always kind of had this entrepreneurial itch, I think I've always had it. Since eight”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They invented the videotape machine and the instant replay. I worked there for two years, but about 18 months in I discovered a computer that looked like it was fast enough to do a video game.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife's sister lived in Silicon Valley, and I was a little bit of an anarchist at that time called me a lapsed Mormon or a failed Mormon or whatever. And I kind of wanted to get out of Utah and see the world a little bit. And so California seemed like a cool place to go. So that Thanksgiving, we drove to California, stayed with my wife's sister, and I papered the street with my resume and got a job at Ampex.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those were the controls, and we played until literally five in the morning. And I thought, wow, if I could put this game in my arcade, it would make money. But then you divided 25 cents a play into a half a million dollar computer and the math didn't work. But I did think to myself, maybe someday the cost will come down and this would be cool.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then I was working summers at the amusement park, winters pursuing an engineering degree at the University of Utah. And wow, one day I saw Steve Russell Space War. A guy named Steve Russell at MIT programmed this game called Space War, and I was mesmerized by it. Let me put a little more context. My fraternity brother says, I got to show you something that'll knock your socks off. He says, meet me at 1 o'clock at the Merrill Engineering Building. And I say, one in the afternoon? He says, no, no, at night. And so one o'clock show up at the Maryland Engineering Building and there was Space War. He handed me a box that had four buttons on the top. Rotate left, rotate right, fire, and hyperspace.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that was sort of where I got indoctrinated because you end up A lot of people don't realize how much coin operated games earn. It's actually quite surprising. And so when you look at each of the coin-operated games as a little business, typically you go into Joe's cafe and say, can I put my machine in your location? Then I'll split the income with you. These locations would very often do one hundred to two hundred dollars a week.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. I started out actually on the midway, selling balls to knock down milk bottles and guessing people's ages, weights, and occupations and, you know, being a carney.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dinner one night, mom said, Boy, we've got so many strawberries we're not going to be able to eat them all. Maybe we'll give them away. I didn't think that much about it. And the next day I happened to go to the grocery store with her, and I saw that in the store, in the grocery store, they were selling strawberries for fifty cents a basket. When I looked at that and I said, hmm, that's what the market is. So I went home, found all the extra little baskets that were around the house, went out, picked a bunch of strawberries, and went up and down the street selling the strawberries for a discount off of what the grocery store was selling, and I sold out in an hour. I mean, I don't even think I made it all the way to the end of the block. And all of a sudden I had more money than I would make on allowance and mowing lawns for a year.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so these are two very iconic sounds. Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza joint with the games that kept you distracted for hours, and an Atari video game, which could frankly distract you for a lot longer, days perhaps. But what's incredible is that both of these childhood experiences were created by the same person, by the same guy, by Nolan Bushnell. He founded Atari just a few years out of college, and he started Chuck E. Cheese just a few years after that. And for Nolan, it all began when he was a kid in Utah in the nineteen fifties, and he learned a very simple lesson about business.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started out essentially designing this little game looking thing out of wood and painting it so that it looked like plastic, but it was really wood. And our idea was to take it to the toy show in New York.”
2017-02-27 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Atari & Chuck E. Cheese's: Nolan Bushnell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT