The Fabulous 128 bite world of Nolan Bushnell

Video games, social media and virtual worlds of today all owe their thanks to Nolan Bushnell. The video game pioneer not only created video games that you could play in your own home, he also pioneered the idea of social gaming. Bushnell created games were meant to be shared. Games that up to four people could pay together and then further expanded the concept with his Chuck E Cheese’s franchise as a place for people to interact socially while playing video games.

Personal computers and a 3 gig home platforms of today was pure science fiction in the early 70’s social gaming meant meeting your friends at your local bowling ally and dropping quarters into a pinball machine. Bushnell who worked servicing the mechanical machines, dreamed of something more than the tables could deliver and in 1971 put his electoral engineering degree to work and along with friend Ted Dabney and created the very first coin operated video game Computer Space. The scrolling rocket ship shooter was a technical triumph but a commercial flop. What Computer Space did however was give this fledgling concept of video games the confidence it needed to get to the next level.

The next year Atari was born and with it, Pong. The video game industry was born on Christmas 1975 when many lucky kids awoke to find the home version of the game under the tree. It was about the experience and Bushnell knew that. It was much more than a little dot on the screen; it was you in the game. The hugely successful Atari 2600 brought out the kid in adults and generational boundaries were smashed as kids found a new way to bond with their parents.

With the success of the 2600 came the rise of the software developers who put there imagination to work and created the games that got better and better as the industry grew and pushed the hardware forward. Gamers as kids grew up to be gamers as adults and there kids in turn became the next generation of games who insisted that the bar keep being raised. Multiplayer gave birth to the on line game and the MMO’s of today. Nolan Bushnell vision has been like a wildfire out of control. Video games of today are geared more towards bringing people together than the stereotype of the lone isolated gamer.

Noland Bushnell is still up to his neck in gaming. He sits on the board of directors of Atari and is designing games to stimulate brain activity in our ageing population. That’s right, video games that help people. In 2008 the social gaming community broke the billion person mark. A billion people meeting, socializing, playing and raising the bar even further.

Bushnell sits atop the mountain admiring the snowball he pushed down the hill forty years ago… and it’s still rolling.