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Father of Video Games turning 60
Bill Kendrick writes "Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and the "father of video games" will be turning 60 next week, on February 5th.
Along with Atari, which Bushnell began in 1972 (and left before the end of the decade), he
also founded over 20 other companies, including Chuck E. Cheese
Pizza Time Theater restaurants. He holds many patents relating to both
video games and other industries.
For more on The Bringer of Pong, check out some interviews from the San Jose Mercury, Metroactive and over at Good Deal Games, as well as his Wikipedia entry. Happy birthday, Nolan!"
... but Al Gore would claim he's the father of that.
"Derp de derp."
Damn you Nolan!
The visonary Steve P Jobs got his visonary mandate from Nolan as a game designer at Atari..
:)
Nolan a worth while Moron to know..okay for tha tinside joke see some of his antics..very non mormon
Don't Tread on OpenSource
He's the one to blame for obesity in young children and people with no lives. No this is not a flame, troll, offtopic, or redundant. Its my failed attempt at humor.
Those were the days. I kind of miss the difficulty switch too.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
And over here is our crowning achievement in amusement technology, an electronic version of what you humans call table tennis. Your primitive paddles have been replaced with a....well we did build this Spaceship you know. Anyone from a species who has mastered intergalactic travel raise your hand.
/There are 10 types of people in this world; those who steal sigs and those don't
As the father of video games, he never married
and has no kids.
Chuck E Cheese OWNS!
I loved that place.
Never had pizza with that unique flavor, either.
Not that Nolan Bushnell doesn't deserve a happy birthday, but isn't Ralph Baer the father of video games?
Maybe the father of video games at home.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
The inventor of pong was Ralph Baer:
http://www.pong-story.com/rhbaer.htm
I know Mr Baer personally, he is a close family friend from Manchester, NH. This story turned my stomach and I am disgusted that slashdot would EVER post such trash without researching a submission like this..
It's a little duplicitous to bash patent and copyright owners on the one hand and then kiss their ass on the other.
Bushnell has done nothing but stifle innovation through his ownership of patents. He is widely recognized as a tight-fisted licensor, charging outrageous amounts to use "his" work. If you ever wonder why video games cost so much both at home and in the arcade, look at this asshole.
Happy birthday, Bushnell.
I have been pwned because my
from http://www.uwink.com/docs/nolan.shtml
a passion for enhancing and improving the educational process
I think Bushnell, as one of the founders of the video game industry, may be one of the people most responsible for degrading the quality students.
I knew better.
This outrageous charge of 25 cents was in fact due to the facist arcade ruler Chairman Bushnell! How dare he drive the price of Pong and Pacman up well over the accepted industry-standard 15 cents (for those younger folk here, many games only cost you a measily 15 centes before the rebel leader Bushnell took power in the now infamous but little known arcade block wars). Once he had monopoly status from the outrageous profits reaped by the masterpiece "Cocnuts" for the Atari 2600, he proceeded to embrace and extend into other markets. For example, did you know that Whack-A-Mole was open source and only cost you 10 cents to play once? (you didn't pay for the game, but rather services rendered by Whack-A-Mole repair men)
We must prevent such atrocities from occuring again, by forcing the Bushnell empire to accept our arcade inspectors.
Really though, I doubt this guy had much to do with the iflated prices of games.
Am I the only one who got the bejeebers scared out of them by that damn anamatronic rat as a toddler/youth? I remember vividly my 5th birthday, I would not be made to come out of the ball pit. that giant fucking rat scared the shit outta me ... and his back up singers, popping up out of the dark like they were fucking gonna stab a poor little dergie *curls up in fetal position*THE HORRORS! THE HORRORS!
To this day I wont go near the damn place, I dont care what arcades they have...
I'm a little tea pot.
If there truly is a God in this universe, I want him/her/it to make sure that Nolan Bushnell spends his 60th birthday fighting crowds of hyperactive kids screaming over the din of 100 videogames just so he can choke down terrible pizza while being serenaded by an animitronic rat or bear or whatever the fuck they've got at Chuck-e-Cheese nowadays.
GMD
watch this
Was SPACEWAR (this version is via PDP-1 assembler running on a java PDP-1 emulator) written in 1962 by a group calling themselves something like "The Hingham Institute for Space Warfare" the lead programmer was Stephen "Slug" Russell. The program was developed on a PDP-1 computer (the first "minicomputer" which cost 1/10th of other computers of the day (only $100,000)) donated by Digital Equipment Corp. to the students of MIT. More of the history. Steve got to testify on his prior art when Magnavox sued Atari on some related patents.
Recursion: To curse repeatedly.
Ok, well, I'll get right on building a new generation of videogames, making an innovative pizza chain, and a theatre chain as well, and then will I have a shot at it? (When I'm 60?)
The inventor of the video game is Steve Russell,
8 .htma r-Arti cle.html
et. al., who wrote the first video game, "Spacewar" on the PDP-1 at MIT in 1962.
See: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa09019
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/PDP-1-SpaceW
- Jim
Now I wasn't really supposed to be in the bar at my age, but my dad would go for an evening cocktail and I would tag along and ask the bartender nicely if I could just hang out by the Pong machine. He usually relented and that was it. I had my own video game before anyone knew what they were!
What great fun that little game was to me! I got really good at it (as kids always do) and would take great delight at setting the paddles just right so the ball would bounce back and forth endlessly. Then I would stand back and admire the way I found just the right touch to beat the alogrithm. It was also fun to see the reaction of adults when they noticed that the game with no one in front of it was in an endless loop on its own. Then I would go back, nudge a paddle, and off we went.
Thank you Nolan Bushnell. You made my summer memorable for more than just the beach and the sun. You opened my eyes to the power of electronics. A career as a programmer later followed.
---------
I remember I saw my first Pong machine back in 1977 (I was 8). We were living in a hotel in Germany at Uncle Sam's expense, awaiting some base housing to be freed up. No way was my dad going to ante up quarters for us to play that silly thing. Fortunately, we had other resources ...
This particular Pong machine had a quirk - if you gave it a mild electrical shock to the changer it would give you a credit to play. A static charge did the job nicely.
So there we were - me and my little brother and other kids zipping up and down the carpeted halls of the hotel in our socks, zapping the Pong machine and playing for hours, with one of us always on the lookout to make sure no one from the hotel saw what we were doing. Even back then I was a larcenous little fsck, trying to Scam The System and get stuff for free.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
... to the tune of the classic new wave hit "Turning Japanese" by the Vapors. "Turning Japanese" was, at the time, some sort of British slang for wanking.
On the rare occasion (twice in 5 years) we've allowed our little ones to drag us to the Kingdom of the Rat, we've left fantasizing about hacking the animatronics to have Chuck E act out the original intent of the song while he sings...
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
Uum, I think we already established the fact that your point is POINTLESS ... if you read the many posts above on this subject.
Nolan Bushnell is the father of video games for the same reason that Ford is famous -- for bringing something of such magnitude to the masses. Bringing it to the masses, not INVENTING it (they're not the same; see the earlier posts if you don't agree).
Also, I seriously doubt that, like so many other inventions, Ralph Baer was the ONLY one who thought of this idea or made a video game -- he's just one of the guys who got the recognition (and, to be honest, I never heard of the guy, so he doesn't get much recognition). Unless you actually think that only one person can be blessed with a revolutionary idea -- that would be ludicrous.
I know not of his endevours with patents/licenses, but I was quite impressed with his Manifesto on Atari's corporate identity.
The points about fairness, customers, and particularly on innovation are something I wish every modern CEO or company official would take to heart, but anymore there doesn't seem to be enough genuine spirit and ideals in american corps.
Nolan didn't run Atari into the ground. Warner Brothers bought Atari and THEY ran it into the ground. They hired an underware salesman to run it, and he got busted insider trading.
I really don't mean this to be sarcastic at all, but if he's turning 60 next week, why am I reading this story today?
I mean it seems logical to me that we talk about him turning 60 when he turns 60. I just don't know why this story made it in today when it wasn't a slow news day at all.
-> Fritz
Spooooon!!!!!