Nolan Bushnell quotes

Nolan Bushnell is an American businessman and engineer, known as the founder of Atari and a pioneer of the video game industry. His innovations helped shape modern interactive entertainment and arcade culture. He has also launched several other successful technology and restaurant ventures. Here are 47 of his quotes:

Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don't get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.

Nolan Bushnell

I've always thought legal addictions are a great way to create a business. Starbucks is a wonderful example.

Nolan Bushnell

Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, 'Oh, no; that'll never work. It's too different.'

Nolan Bushnell

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.

Nolan Bushnell

I don't feel 70. I am still looking out from 14-year-old eyes.

Nolan Bushnell

I was actually the manager of the games department of an amusement park when I was at college, so I understood the coin-op side of the games business very well.

Nolan Bushnell

In 1980, Atari was bringing in around two billion dollars in revenue and Chuck E. Cheese's some five hundred million. I still didn't feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple - although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be a mistake.

Nolan Bushnell

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

Nolan Bushnell

I'd love to design a school.

Nolan Bushnell

Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.

Nolan Bushnell

Today, companies have to radically revolutionize themselves every few years just to stay relevant. That's because technology and the Internet have transformed the business landscape forever. The fast-paced digital age has accelerated the need for companies to become agile.

Nolan Bushnell

Radical innovation is difficult to fund. It seems scary. And the really radical things seem even more scary.

Nolan Bushnell

The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.

Nolan Bushnell

I think 'Something Ventured' is a nice piece because it celebrates venture capital in a unique and powerful way.

Nolan Bushnell

Being your own boss is much superior to working for the man. Including working for your father.

Nolan Bushnell

In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.

Nolan Bushnell

Everybody copied Atari products. So we started messing with them and it was fun. We bought enough chips that we could get them mislabeled. So we bankrupted at least two companies which copied our boards, and bought all the parts but they were the wrong parts, so they're sitting on all this inventory they can't sell because the games don't work.

Nolan Bushnell

All schools will end up using game metrics in the future.

Nolan Bushnell

I basically look at PR as something you do if there's an object in mind. But my ego doesn't need it.

Nolan Bushnell

I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.

Nolan Bushnell

Young adults love to play games and they're thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers.

Nolan Bushnell

We're moving away from a credentialed society to a merit society.

Nolan Bushnell