Nolan Bushnell Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The true entrepreneur is a doer

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

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.

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.

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets.

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.

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

People hate to and will not read instructions.

I'd love to design a school.

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

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

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Being successful is kind of dull.

Creativity in life is about saying yes to new ideas.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.

The true entreprenuer is a doer,not a dreamer.

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.'

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

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.

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.