@BlueWizard422: oh..........fuck i wish i could delete my post....

Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.

w00t, score 1 for intelligent actors <3

Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.

@goldwings: A movie is in the works based on Nolan Bushnell's life and Atari, and Leo DiCaprio may be the one to play him. That's all.

BlueWizard422

I believe that a company can only really have a vision so long as its original founders are still guiding it. Once they leave, the sharks take to the water and it becomes like every other business. The only thing that matters is money money money money money money money money money money.

dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased

Still remember my Atari VCS 2600... he's right, at that time Atari stood for
something, something which was called "fun".

Solitary_Satellite

@goldwings: hes supposed to be playing bushnell in a movie about atari if i remember correctly.

Detre

That's actually a very solid piece of advice, good job, sir!

sisedi

Yeah Atari has a core vision now. Minigames,yay!
Stupid Phil Harrison. What's wrong with you. I'm sure the designers or artists or someone there has some good ideas better than minigames.

Netnavi

Tough crowd tonight, huh.

Miksho

I really, really, really do not get your jokes with Nolan Bushnell pictured as Leo. I don't watch many movies so I won't know if it's a reference or something.

goldwings

That picture is Leo Di's depiction of Bushnell, not Bushnell himself! You are messing with my mind!!!!!

tralu

There's only one UWink. I've been to it. To be quite honest, I don't really expect more than a few of them. It's a bit of fun, but overpriced and gimmicky

riffleraffle

Nolan Bushnell is my favorite actor.

Murgatron

I STAND FOR STANDING....owait.

Raziel Dune

Why do we listen to Bushnell again? The man whose "vision" wasn't able to foresee the crash that destroyed not only his company, but the entire industry? I wonder what those "core values" of his were - too bad we'll never know.

He's not even talking about videogames specifically, just about general business 101 principles in the most generic and hardly helpful terms: "have a vision, have a strong brand". Huh, thanks Nole.

Antiterra

You mean I can't just buy a logo from a defunct once great company that looks good on tshirts and sit on my ass and expect the money to roll in?

He's absolutely right but why does he even need to say it.

TurtleSoup

Here's my Five Year Plan for Nolan Bushnell-

1) Go to France.
2) Reach Inside his Pocket to grab his wallet.
3) Remove all the cash from his wallet.
4) Take out anything bigger than a fiver.
5) Look in his back pocket for the quarters and that dime he was saving for parking.
6) Throw all that money ($13.60) at France. Congratulations, he's just bought back Atari.
7) Run Atari for the rest of his life as he wants to.

I like the visual of the guy from the Hot Tub Picture Nolan Bushnell fishing in his pockets for change to throw at a collective nation.

Mascott

@GummyTumor: lol how about huge pixel explosions

"Captain! She won't hold much longer!"
"We have to! We NEED to make it to 9-bit!!!!"
**Kapow**

Gantz: Your Trusted Friend in Science.

A movie about the guy behind Atari?! ... . .. there better be plenty of explosions, lots of em!

GummyTumor

@Antiterra:

Until you found a successful video game company...until you have any real experience as a video game designer...

...just shut the fuck up.

Anytime Kotaku publishes an article stating the viewpoint of an industry veteran, trolls like you come along to ask "Why are we listening to him again"?

Because he's Nolan Bushnell, damnit. Why should anyone listen to YOU?

Poochy

So did the core vision Nolan Bushnell had when he ran the company involve cocaine and prostitutes? Because, you know...

Stormrider

@Antiterra: This I agree with. I mean honestly...look at Bill Gates, he stuck with his company and it's a whole different thing or so I hear.

I mean it's easy to say "there's no vision" when you're outside looking in...but put him in the company hot tub and we'll see what comes up to the surface.

;)

Spoony Bard

@Antiterra: @Spoony Bard: Warner kind of ran him out of the business. His main mistake was selling out.

When they appointed executives that Bushnell couldn't tolerate, he left, and was forced to sign a five-year non-compete agreement. It was during that five years that Warner drove the videogame industry into the ground.

BtownDesignGuy

@Poochy: "Just shut the fuck up?" Classy, real classy.

Brian Ashcraft

But on the otherhand, that does basically confirm his argument.

DoomPlague

Considering that the company he founded died long ago (Atari is just a brand now, which was picked up by Hasbro, then Infogrames), I'm not sure how well the "founded a successful videogame company" argument holds up.

DoomPlague

party that is

Orionsaint

When I was a young punk. Nolan Bushnell was like the rockstar of gaming. He was the coolest. When he left Atari. It was like the part was over. The industry just went to hell. Until Nintendo brought it back.

Orionsaint

He didn't say anything of value. It's like telling a football team, "You have to want to win!".

Thanks for the insight, Nolan.

everybest

I would love to see what DiCaprio looks like with a beard.

Um...Bushnell's right though. Nintendo is Nintendo because their name stands for something. The company has vision. They stand for something. Atari has been little more than a logo for the last fifteen years.

Erinaceus

@Poochy:
Game industry veterans are not saints nor gods nor dem-gods. They are just people. People with flaws. Like you and me.

And Nolan recently said very, very, very stupid things about using Trusted Computing in comsumer products to fight *yarrr* piracy, at a time, when even the music industry is backing away from DRM.

Kajetan

@Poochy:

Fantastic. You completely just dismissed the entire critical community, of which Kotaku and its editors are card-carrying members. Like Bash said, classy, especially when Antiterra's involved.

In any case, no, you don't need to be a veteran of any industry to comment on it any more than Bushnell needs to be sitting on top of Atari, going down with the sinking ship for a second time. I don't know if he was still around in 1983/84 when Atari was at the forefront of the death of the North American gaming industry, but I do know that Atari never, ever really recovered from it. Oh, they tried many times, but it never happened. I wouldn't categorize Atari as being successful, regardless if Bushnell was in the picture. They succeeded for a very short period of time and just imploded.

Over the years, they have backed so many unsuccessful titles that Alone in the Dark might be their last hurrah - and it doesn't look too good from here. It's not that the games they back are terrible; they're just normally subpar compared to their competitors. Time and again, Atari has simply failed to get their head on straight enough to put something out that people want to have on top of all the expenditures in the 90s wasted on failed hardware (Jaguar and Lynx come to mind).

What Atari needs isn't a vision for its brand - it just needs to get a hold of the fucking pulse. Maybe Bushnell is thinking on different terms since he's got a personal stake in it - it is, after all, his legacy. But a vision isn't going to save a company from anything. It may help unify the people under its banner in the sense that "this is what we want to achieve," but whether or not they achieve it is a different story. No company wants to run into the ground by just winging it and going, "hey, whatever." I'm sure they do have a vision for the company - it's just that I'm sure there's a lot of factors like internal politics that prevents them from ever realizing that vision.

You don't need to be an industry vet to see it.

dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased

@Poochy: Bushnell left/was forced out of Atari before it became hugely sucessful. He laid the foundations, and that shouldn't be disregarded, but he left in 1978 (the 2600 was launched in 1977). Again, he founded Atari, yes, absolutely, but he's not the one who made into a billion-dollar company.
As for having experience as a videogame designer, well... I wasn't aware Bushnell was an accomplished game designer, but hey, you learn something new everyday!

If trolls like me criticise the guy, it's probably because we are trollily annoyed with someone who has been out of the business for... what, 2 decades? and still pretends to give advice, make criticisms, etc. Not to mention that, like I said previously, it's always in the most generic, can't-really-disagree terms, with nothing specific - kinda like me telling Morgan Staley they should ensure the profitability of their asset management strategy - no, really?

In my trollish opinion, Bushnell lacks legitimacy regarding the videogame industry of today, which holds little - if anything - in common with the one he pioneered. Miyamoto he ain't.

Antiterra

I don't see how his life story could be half as interesting as Howard Hughes', but I relish the notion of Leonardo in old guy makeup, yelling the corporate equivalent of "Get off my lawn!"

Billkwando

I wonder how things would have to turned out if Warner Bros hadn't nose dived everything to the ground

Gutter_Trash

Is "architecting" a word? My spell checker doesn't seem to think so.

Sasquatch

@Antiterra: Get your history straight. Bushnell was forced out of Atari in 1978, well before the crash in 1983.

Doomstalk

I think maybe Nolan ought to take a page from guys like Wozniak and Paul Allen-- have a bit of perspective, feel free to comment about Atari's fortunes, but really keep it to wishing those guys well. The same as I wouldn't really listen to Paul Allen's take on Microsoft's business model now-- because he's been out of the loop for years-- I'm not going to listen to Nolan. If the business even remotely resembled the thing Busnhnell left, maybe, but the game has changed utterly. People like Woz and Allen are well-loved because they moved on and didn't feel compelled to make a big scene about themselves. Bushnell's an artifact of a different time-- and should be well-loved for his contributions-- but every time he offers up unsolicited advice like this it sounds like sour grapes, and serves to remind us he's not a very likable figure.

wild homes gets retconned!

Whoa, that pic isn't of leonardo de caprio in the aviator or catch me if you can?

Very strange. They must be twins separated at birth or something.

EdwinJ85

Atari needs to make a "great" console (or gaming device of some sort) if they ever want to "stand for something" again. It would generate buzz/interest/speculation/rumors/etc and get people talking about Atari again.

Atari games without an Atari console has never worked (or felt right)... much like Sega.

sandwiches