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

Probably not a lie

[Sangloth]

I worked for Nolan Bushnell at uWink, very quickly I heard his complaints about the excessive violence of first person shooters. His opinion never strayed. He praised non-violent games, and was disgusted with violent ones.

A quick look at the games uWink has should show his outlook. All the games uWink has are non-violent. The only games which could be an exception was Scarab and Baloon Popper, and they were:
A) Not in the least bit bloody.
B) Part of the Software aquired from Playnet. While Playnet technically had Nolan's name on it, it didn't have his active involvment like uWink.

All the games created by uWink don't even have a hint of meanness in them. They are all like Pong in spirit, in that they deal with falling blocks, cards, or mental puzzles. These are the types of games that Nolan wanted to create. If there was a bloody Atari game, it was probably created after the point where Nolan lost control.

Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.