Back in 1973, Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” was blaring from the PA in a California warehouse as two dozen women in flared jeans assembled Pong circuit boards. The smell of corned beef and marijuana wafted down the manufacturing line. Orders for Atari’s landmark table tennis video game were still pouring in on the…
A day after saying it would give Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell its 2018 Pioneer Award, the organizers of the Game Developers Conference have pulled the award, saying they will now award it to no one. The quick change followed 18 hours of outcry about Bushnell’s alleged unsavory behavior toward female Atari…
ESPN's E:60 newsmagazine ran an evergreen feature last night on the history of sports video games and, while largely a collection of celebrities' memories, it did feature, at long last, a mea culpa of sorts for Shaq Fu, widely regarded as one of the worst video games of all time.
'On a Path to Irrelevance': Atari founding father Nolan Bushnell, who knows a thing or two about failed consoles, thinks Nintendo is pinched. The hardware it does well—handheld gaming-only devices—"don't make sense" compared to tablets or mobile phones. And he thinks the Wii U's target audience is limited.
The people who make "Lore in a Minute" have been branching out from video games to provide some fun (short!) history lessons about important video game personalities. This week, it's Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell.
Everyone's familiar with the great video game burial of 1983, a disposal of Atari 2600 cartridges so bizarre it's often taken to be urban myth. No, that's really how they got rid of colossal flops like E.T. and the Pac-Man port, 30 years ago this September.
Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari and...other things, chats with Eurogamer's Simon Parkin.
Every year sees the release of movies about making music, movies about making other culture and, of course, movies about making movies. Movies about making games? Only once in a while, as with Indie Game The Movie.
A group of filmmakers have launched a new project called Critical Path that sets out to be the "definitive documentary archive project" for video game culture and history.
40 years ago today, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney got together and founded the company that catapulted the world into the video game era. It was called Syzgy. Or it would have been, but Syzgy wasn't available, so they called it Atari. The rest is a gigantic, four decade-spanning infographic celebrating the company's…
Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari and also the man behind Chuck E. Cheese's, won't just be remembered for those two towering achievements.
The guy also made robots.
In honor of Pong's 40th anniversary, publisher Atari is now taking entries for what it calls the "Pong Indie Developer Challenge," it said today. For a shot at winning $100,000 and a publishing agreement with Atari, you can dream up your own version of Pong and draw up "at the very least" a design document.
It's a scourge of junior high school students everywhere: Mononucleosis. The highly infectious disease is colloquially dubbed the "kissing disease". But that's not how Steve Jobs got it. He got it making a video game.
Last week, I attended the Game Developers' Conference Online in Austin. I was there to give a talk about game storytelling, but I stayed for the entire event, and caught a good number of talks, workshops, and keynotes. On Monday, Gamasutra (who helps put on GDC each year) ran a fun collection of quotes from the event,…
When do we get the Seinfeld of video games? Why won't there be any major new gaming consoles? And just when will get video game technology implanted in our brains? At GDC Online in Austin, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell predicted and expounded upon many things.
Sounds like an email spam subject line, I know, but it's actually a claim made by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.
The most terrifying all animal band in history is finally getting the recognition it deserves. The Registry of Historic Gaming locations is adding the site of the original Chuck E. Cheese's to it's list of historic sites. First built in San Jose, California in 1977, Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre was the first…
Last year, illustrator Len Peralta crafted a set of 52 collectible trading cards based on the geek elite, from music, television, video games and beyond. Now, those "Geek A Week" cards are made real, thanks to ThinkGeek.
In 1972, Nolan Bushnell founded Atari. The company would go on to define video games during the 1970s. And just when things were getting good, Bushnell sold the company in 1976 to Time Warner — a move he now regrets.
The International Video Games Hall of Fame inducts its first class in August. Located in Ottumwa, Iowa, known for its ties to the gaming's early arcade days, the Hall will enshrine more twice as many high score champions as developers.
