Founder / CEO · Atari · b. 1943 · 1972–1978
Nolan Bushnell co-founded Atari in 1972 and created Pong, launching the commercial video game industry — then built Atari into a billion-dollar company before selling it to Warner Communications and eventually departing as it declined.
Bushnell had been fascinated by computers since working the midway at an amusement park as a teenager, and his early game Computer Space (1971), co-designed with Ted Dabney, was the first commercially sold arcade video game — though its complex controls limited its success. The following year he founded Atari with Dabney and hired Al Alcorn to build Pong, a table tennis simulation whose simplicity made it immediately understandable to any bar patron. Pong became the first commercially successful arcade video game and established the template for the coin-op industry: simple rules, immediate feedback, and the pull to insert another quarter. Bushnell grew Atari rapidly through the mid-1970s, developing the 2600 home console and hiring a young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak among dozens of engineers who passed through the company. His management style was famously informal — engineers were encouraged to work late, think experimentally, and push hardware limits — but the company's structure was chaotic, and Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 for $28 million, remaining as chairman. He clashed repeatedly with Warner management over creative direction and departed in 1978. After leaving, he founded Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre and numerous technology ventures. Without Bushnell's combination of carnival-barker showmanship and genuine engineering understanding, the commercial video game industry would have found a different founding myth — but it is hard to imagine a more effective one.