Nolan Bushnell

“We had some really powerful technology - 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.”

“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.”

“Being your own boss is much superior to working for the man. Including working for your father.”

“Every one who has taken a shower has had an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it that makes a difference.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Do I really want to do a mobile game that's one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.”

“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.”

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

“The game business reinvents itself every five years.”

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

“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.”

“I've always been a tech-head.”