Nolan Bushnell Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

The true entrepreneur is a doer

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

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.

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

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

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.

Any business that does not innovate will fail over time.

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.

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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 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.

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.

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

People hate to and will not read instructions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.

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.

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

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

I always try to do something nobody else has done.

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

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