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.
Nolan BushnellI 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.
Nolan BushnellI'm the only one who was predicting the Nintendo Wii would beat Sony's PlayStation 3.
Nolan BushnellI don't think people understand how much hard work innovation is. That it's not just getting an idea. You really have to cross your T's and dot your I's long before you ever start on the project. I don't think people perceive that about me. I work hard.
Nolan BushnellYou wanna build your IQ higher in the next two years? Be uncomfortable. That means, learn something where you have a beginner's mind.
Nolan BushnellI 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.
Nolan BushnellI 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.
Nolan Bushnell