Nolan Bushnell Condemns Grand Theft Auto

Thanks to Newsweek for their extremely short, but somewhat illuminating mini-interview with Nolan Bushnell, timed to coincide with this weekend's Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. The founder of Atari and creator of the RoboCat briefly summarizes Atari's glory days: "Since we were so limited with graphics then, we had to focus on gameplay", but is dismissive of today's violent titles, saying: "I don't like the ones that glorify antisocial behavior, like Grand Theft Auto and Vice City. We actually had a rule at Atari, which seems kind of quaint now, that you could blow up a tank, a plane, a car - but you couldn't do violence against a human." There are more complete interviews with Bushnell archived at the San Jose Tech Museum site and at Joystick101.org.

Comments

Custer's Revenge

[slothman32]

What about Custer's Revenge? Doesn't that inflict pain on people. I haven't played it but it seems to be against the "but you couldn't do violence against a human" rule. That rule doesn't seem to apply to aliens and monsters as well. Does Atari have some bias against them? I do agree that modern games have less gameplay and more graphics especially violence than earlier in games' life.

Re:Lies!

[indead]

It was also a bootleg - not made by Atari.

Re:Probably not a lie

[pmz]

If there was a bloody Atari game, it was probably created after the point where Nolan lost control.

I remember Doom being a flagship game for the Jaguar, at least in the marketing. Although I never had a Jaguar, my Lynx games were generally pretty clean (actaully the Lynx was a pretty darn good hand-held).