Hey everyone, Happy Monday!
Recently I watched an amazing docuseries on Netflix called “High Score” which is about the early years of video gaming and the e-sports industry. And that’s where today’s titan is from!
Nolan Bushnell is the co-founder of Atari, Inc. and one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. He first debuted a game called Pong (which I am sure you have heard of if not played), which he developed with Allan Alcorn, as an arcade game in 1971. The machine was so popular that on the first night it broke down when its coin receptacle became overloaded. He later sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million.
Nolan is credited with Bushnell's Law, a principle about videogame design saying - All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master. They should reward the first quarter and the hundredth.
By the way, starting Atari is not all he did, he also started Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza
1 STORY FROM HIM
Pong had become a huge success. They made a couple of hundred Pong games during 1972 toward the end of the year which grew to 13,000 Pong games by the next year. The competition made more than that; everybody was making knockoffs.
Their copiers were essentially fast followers. They’d buy one of their games, they’d Xerox the printed circuit board, they’d ramp up manufacturing, and go for it. They were jackals. It pissed Bushnell and Atari off.
The guy who was making boards for Atari was also making extra copies and selling them to the competitors.
Bushnell and Atari started countermeasures. They were a big semiconductor customer by then, so they asked them to privately mark some parts that they were using, and they designed some games so if the copiers just read the parts and ordered the parts and plugged them in, they wouldn’t work. Because they were the wrong parts! That put one of their competitors out of business. Bushnell and the team later had a little champagne party on their front lawn when they declared bankruptcy. By 1974, Atari had gotten rid of the knockoffs for good.
2 QUOTES FROM HIM
“Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you're not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you're not going to make progress.”
“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.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
The Dice Game
When asked how Nolan decides what he wants to do each year, he said he rolls the dice, and calls this approach Dice Game. While it seems like a whimsical approach to projects, he said it helps him take on challenges that push him out of his comfort zone. So he writes up 11 challenges for the next year, putting them in a hat and rolling the dice to see which he’ll tackle. For example, in 2013, the Dice Game did urge him to write a book called Finding the Next Steve Jobs.
It's not enough to have a good idea; you have to understand the numbers that make it work.
That was a lesson Bushnell impressed on his children, says Alissa Bushnell, his eldest daughter. At restaurants, he would challenge his young kids to estimate how much profit the restaurant made in a day by studying guest patterns and orders coming out of the kitchen. He would then say, "The first one to get the answer that's in my head gets dessert.”
One way to improve the ability to forecast how much money can be made from an idea is learning how to play Go, the ancient Asian board game, Bushnell says. "This is a game about planning moves five, six, or seven moves in the future," he said.
Don’t hire dead people
Nolan was asked what advice he would give the group, especially those in leadership positions. Nolan had a rather unique response saying, “The most important thing is don’t hire dead people. People tend to die from the neck up long before they are buried. … To have people just putting in time will sap the life out of your business.” It’s a lesson for us all that despite the challenges and odds that we face, it’s important we bring a sense of drive and desire to challenge the status quo.
Fun Fact - Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak worked under Bushnell at Atari before they started Apple. Bushnell gave the duo the idea for a paddle-based game where players tried to destroy bricks. Wozniak took the lead and played a significant role in designing what would then become the superhit game “Breakout”
That’s it from me, until next time! Feel free to reach out to me by replying to this email or on twitter 👋
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