A Game Creator Updates the ‘70s

Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari Corp. in 1972 and sparked a video game revolution, is back where he started: in the world of coin-operated game machines.

Bushnell, 58, has created UWink Inc., a Playa del Rey company that makes and distributes game machines in restaurants, cafes, hotels and bars.

There’s one big difference: UWink machines, unlike Atari arcade games, are hooked to the Web, connecting once a day to upload data, including player scores and credit card information, and download new games via a dial-up connection. In the future, Bushnell sees them perpetually connected via broadband so gamers across the country can play one another in real time.

UWink games are similar to “Pong,” Atari’s simple yet addictive arcade game from the 1970s. They are either beat-the-clock puzzles or trivia games that deliver short bursts of game play.

From Bushnell’s 30-year vantage point in the video game industry, not much has changed about how people play games. They still enjoy games that are “simple to learn but impossible to master.” That was the formula he used in building Atari, a company that employed Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the pair who went on to found Apple Computer Inc.

Bushnell, who also has started 20 other businesses, including Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theaters, talked recently about the state of today’s game industry and its online prospects.

Q: What was the first game you created?

It was a game called “Computer Space” in 1971. I designed it but licensed it to another company. “Pong” came after that in the spring of 1972.

Q: Legend has it that the first “Pong” arcade quit working after a few days because it was so jammed with quarters.

That’s true. It took about two days. It was absolutely electric. I’d actually talk to the guys who installed the machine and said, “If we can do $5 a day, that’s a good game. If it’s $10 a day, it’s a great game.” It was doing $60, which had never happened before. It just blew my expectations off the hinges.

Q: What do you think was Atari’s contribution to the game industry?

At the time, it was very hard to do things technically. We didn’t do a square ball in “Pong” because we thought it was cool. We did it because that was all we could do. We found ways to make games fun. We also had a rule against violence. You could not shoot a human being. You could blow up a tank or an airplane, but never a person. We felt that was kind of an important rule. Atari never violated that until long after I sold the company. We found that when a game was nonviolent and not overly complex, it appealed to everyone.

Q: Give an example.

In the 1970s, 40% of our players were female. Remember, it was socially acceptable for women to challenge men on a game of “Pong.” Women were very, very good at “Pong.” It was part of the dating scene. The number of people who told me they met their wife or husband playing “Pong” was huge. They were shoulder to shoulder, talking and playing. It was body contact and verbal contact. And it was fun. Virtually no women play games in arcades today.

Q: What are you trying to do today with your new company, UWink Inc.?

We are basically trying to re-create the same demographic we had in the 1970s and 1980s. We’re actually proving that the market is still there. We’ve put people who say they’re not gamers in a room with our games, and pretty soon they’re addicted. I’ve always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.

Q: You’re swimming against the tide. Most games today strive to be highly cinematic and chock-full of features.

You have different games for different people. When I am on an airplane, I like to take a walk up and down the aisles of a plane and check out what people are playing. It’s solitaire. Not “Doom” or “Quake.” On a recent flight to London, I noticed that more than half were playing some form of simple game like “Tetris.”

Q: Now that you’re involved in the world of online games, do you think mainstream America will want to play online games from their living room consoles?

Yes, absolutely. People like to compete with other people. There will be some element of competition. The online element for the PC clearly works. The Sega Dreamcast was online, but Sega never created a good community of players. You never felt like you were part of a community when you were playing. Whether Sony’s PlayStation 2 or the Xbox from Microsoft does it right, I don’t know. But the concept in general, properly executed, could be very successful. We plan to be helpful there. We have some very important content that will be well-tested in the public eye.

Q: How?

We can download a new game on our machines every two weeks. We have a trivia game where we can download new questions all the time. If something happens in the world of sports last week, we’ll have questions about it. It’s fresh. That’s what the Internet is all about. We’re halfway between a game company and a TV network. We’re always producing new content. But it’s interactive.

Q: Why did arcades lose their luster after the 1980s?

What happened was a series of stupid decisions. Games in arcades aren’t as fun as they used to be. They became the same. A fighting game is a fighting game, whether you punch, kick, fight in the street or Mars; it’s all the same. Same thing with driving games. Snowmobile, powerboat, race car or jeep. It’s still a driving game. “Gone With the Wind” is a great movie, but sequel 203 of that movie would be boring. That’s what happened in the arcade, it was just a victim of a lack of creativity. Everybody felt they had to have this polygon war, and game budgets for coin-operated games pushed $4 million. One of the things that happens when things cost so much is that innovation suffers because the risk is so high.

Q: How do you change that?

Here’s a small example. We have blackboards here on the walls, which increase creativity by dropping the risk of writing on the wall. Paint would be too risky because it’s considered too permanent. Chalk is OK because I can erase it. What my companies generally have in common is a highly creative atmosphere, because we block the cost of failure. I want to see new stuff. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re going to fail.

Q: Are you a technologist or an entrepreneur?

I clearly started as a technologist. I have a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Utah. I started graduate school at Stanford University, but I started to make too much money, so I dropped out.

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.

My technical skills have always stood me in good stead. Right now, it allows me to hire really good people who are much smarter than I am. I think of myself as the guy that sits on the fence looking at the marketing, finance, technology operations, and I coordinate all of them. But I make sure I have people who are better than I am at each of them.

Q: What’s your definition of a fun game?

One that’s easy to learn and impossible to master. What you really want to do is have someone walk up to a game and be able to play within 15 seconds without reading a manual. We’re too close to it because we’re gamers.

You want to have a distributed instruction game: It teaches you as you play. People hate manuals. They even hate on-screen instructions. So you have to spread it out so the game grows with you. You can have more fun while you’re learning more complex games.

You also want to create tension by putting a high level of risk with a high level of reward. To get a really high score, you have to take big risks. Another rule is that you make games for different markets. Certain people like certain genres. On our box, we have 42 games. We have to balance our portfolio. We’re the mutual fund of game machines.

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Times staff writer Alex Pham covers the video game industry.