Nolan bushnell quotes

When it kind of went to 'Street Fighter', where you had to push 13 buttons with all 13 of your fingers and ripped the spine out of somebody, you know, violent games lost the women. Complexity lost the casual gamer.

Video games in some ways are too powerful, they have too much resonance with kids. And it's very easy to overdose on video games and to let the outside world go by.

You wanna build your IQ higher in the next two years? Be uncomfortable. That means, learn something where you have a beginner's mind.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

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.

I believe that in games, when you're talking about pitting my wits and my brain against your wits and your brain, that simplicity of the game becomes a dominant factor.

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

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

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.

I basically look at PR as something you do if there's an object in mind. But my ego doesn't need it.

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

I've been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants, communications systems, touch screens, and now I'm back in games. I like to say I have five-year A.D.D.

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.

In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E. Cheese's, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house on the Champ de Mars in Paris, right between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire. The home was quite amazing: At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement.

I'd love to design a school.

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

The true entreprenuer is a doer,not a dreamer.

I appreciate the fact that technology and games are a big part of life.

If you're willing to work harder than anybody else, you can create your own luck

Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. We had some of the most sophisticated sound-creating systems, and were instrumental in MIDI.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

I'm a big believer in the Wii. I love the physicality of the Wii controller, and how you can get the feeling of throwing a bowling ball or swinging a golf club. Those are the kinds of games I really like.

Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That's because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. The fast-paced digital age has accelerated the need for companies to become agile.

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.

If you don't hire at least one or two people that are smarter than you are, then you're a terrible manager and I don't need you.

Walk to work, even if it's four miles. Ride a bike to work. Drive a different way. On your way there, try to find beauty. You'd be surprised how much more of the neighborhood you can perceive and experience when you're looking for unique spots of beauty.

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

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.

I don't think people understand how much hard work innovation is. That it's not just getting an idea. You really have to cross your T's and dot your I's long before you ever start on the project. I don't think people perceive that about me. I work hard.

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.

People hate to and will not read instructions.

I think 'Something Ventured' is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way.

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

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.

Creativity in life is about saying yes to new ideas.

Any business that does not innovate will fail over time.

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

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

The truth is just an excuse for lack of imagination.

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

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.

Radical innovation is difficult to fund. It seems scary. And the really radical things seem even more scary.

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.

The true entrepreneur is a doer

I like games where you can use stealth and guile. As you get older, it's like the difference between playing squash and racketball. Squash is an older man's game, because if you're stealthy and wily, you can beat a better-co-ordinated and stronger, younger person.

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

I think in terms of businesses, in terms of things that are really big and marry technology with entertainment. That's where I like to spend my time.

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

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

Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese's were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.

'Grand Theft Auto', in its deification of antisocial behavior, is where I heap the most of my scorn.

If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it's history.

A lot of people think that success is luck and being in the right place at the right time. But I think if you’re willing to work harder than anybody else, you can create an awful lot of your own luck.

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.

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

My perception is that I'm a guy who really does a lot of homework surrounding any project that I do.

I've always been a tech-head.

When you're building something, you know all of the trade-offs.

I always try to do something nobody else has done.

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.'

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.

Can liberty be destroyed by the truth?

Being successful is kind of dull.

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets.

We're moving away from a credentialed society to a merit society.

People can buy a bottle of gin and drink it at home for about a buck a drink, whereas they are willing to go to a bar and pay 12 bucks for the same cocktail. The difference is that man needs to be social. So I believe that there is a strong demand for games that are social.

The best ideas lose their owners and take on lives of their own.