Early career and Syzygy Bushnell worked at
Lagoon Amusement Park for many years while attending college. He was made manager of the games department two seasons after starting. In 1970, Bushnell and Dabney formed Syzygy with the intention of producing a
Spacewar! clone known as
Computer Space. They made an agreement with
Nutting Associates, a maker of coin-op trivia and shooting games, that produced a fiberglass cabinet for the unit that included a coin-slot mechanism.
Computer Space was a commercial failure, though sales exceeded $3 million. Bushnell felt that Nutting Associates had not marketed the game well, and by a roofing company.). They rented their first office on Scott Boulevard in
Sunnyvale, California, contracted with
Bally Manufacturing to create a video game and a pinball table, and hired their second employee,
engineer Allan Alcorn. After Bushnell attended a
Burlingame, California demonstration of the
Magnavox Odyssey, he gave the task of making a similar product to the Magnavox table tennis game to Alcorn as a test project. He told Alcorn that he was making the game as a consumer product for General Electric, in order to motivate him. while Bushnell felt Dabney was holding back the company from larger financial success. Bushnell purchased Dabney's share of Atari for in 1973. Even with Kee's output, Atari had difficulty meeting demand for arcade games, and by 1974 Atari was facing financial hardships in part due to the competition in the arcade game market. Bushnell opted to merge Kee Games into Atari in September 1974 just ahead of the release of
Tank, a wholly original arcade game from Kee.
Tank was an arcade success and helped bolster Atari's finances. Keenan became president of Atari and managed its operations while Bushnell retained his CEO role. would go on to revolutionize the home gaming market, but Bushnell was forced out of Atari not long after its release. With the company financially stable, Atari entered the
consumer electronics market, with its home
Pong consoles first released in 1975. Atari continued to make variants of its existing arcade games for dedicated home consoles until 1977. During this period, former Atari employees
Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak had approached Bushnell about investing in their home computer system, the
Apple I, that was built from borrowed parts from Atari and with technical support from Atari employees. They initially offered the design to Bushnell and Atari, but Bushnell wanted Atari to focus on arcade and home consoles. Later in 1975, Jobs offered Bushnell a chance for one-third equity stake in their budding company
Apple Inc., for ; Bushnell remarked in hindsight, "I was so smart, I said no. It's kind of fun to think about that, when I'm not crying." Bushnell also established the first
Pizza Time Theatre in San Jose in 1977 as a means for Atari to stock its arcade games. This console eventually was released in 1977 as the
Atari Video Computer System or Atari VCS and later known as the Atari 2600. However, before Atari had completed its design, the
Fairchild Channel F, the first home console to use
game cartridges, was released in November 1976. Bushnell realized they needed to speed up the Atari VCS's development. After initially considering to become a
public company, he instead sought a buyer.
Warner Communications, looking to boost their own failing media properties, agreed to acquire Atari for , with Bushnell personally receiving , in November 1976. Warner provided a large investment into the Atari VCS to allow it to be completed early the next year and released in September 1977. Kassar created successful advertising and marketing throughout 1978, positioning the Atari VCS for a larger sales period at the end of the year.
Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre In 1977, while at Atari, Bushnell purchased Pizza Time Theatre back from Warner Communications. It had been created by Bushnell, originally as a place where kids could go and eat
pizza and play
video games, which would therefore function as a distribution channel for Atari games. Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre also had
animatronic animals that played music as entertainment. It is known that Bushnell had always wanted to work for Walt Disney, but was continually turned down for employment when he was first starting out after graduation; Chuck E. Cheese was his homage to Disney and the technology developed there. In 1981 Bushnell turned over day-to-day food operations of Chuck E. Cheese's to a newly hired restaurant executive and focused on
Catalyst Technologies. Through 1981 and 1982, Bushnell concentrated on PTT subsidiaries
Sente Technologies and Kadabrascope. Sente was a reentry into the coin-operated game business. Arcade cabinets would have a proprietary system with a cartridge slot so operators could refresh their games without having to buy whole new cabinets. Kadabrascope was an early attempt at computer assisted animation. In 1983 as the restaurants started to lose money, Sente, though profitable, was sold to Bally for $3.9 million and Kadabrascope was sold to
Lucasfilm which became the beginnings of what became
Pixar. During this time Bushnell was using large loans on his Pizza Time stock to fund Catalyst. By the end of 1983, Chuck E. Cheese was having serious financial problems. President and long-time friend Joe Keenan resigned that fall. Nolan tried to step back in, blaming the money problems on over-expansion, too much tweaking of the formula and saturation in local markets by the management team. He resigned in February 1984, when the board of directors rejected his proposed changes, and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater (now named after its famous rat mascot) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March of 1984.
ShowBiz Pizza Place, a competing Pizza/Arcade family restaurant, then purchased Pizza Time Theatre in May 1985 and assumed its debt. The newly formed company, ShowBiz Pizza Time, Inc., operated restaurants under both brands before unifying all locations under the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza brand by 1993. Today over 560 locations of this restaurant are in business.
Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital Group Bushnell founded
Catalyst Technologies, one of the earliest
business incubators. The Catalyst Group companies numbered in the double digits and included
Androbot,
Etak, Cumma, and Axlon. Axlon launched many consumer and consumer electronic products successfully, most notably
AG Bear, a bear that mumbled/echoed a child's words back to it. In the late 1980s, Axlon managed the development of two new games for the Atari 2600, most likely as part of a marketing attempt to revive sales of the system, already more than a decade old. This included Motorodeo, a
monster truck-themed games that was one of the last games developed for the Atari 2600 system, being released in 1990. The company was largely sold to
Hasbro. Etak, founded in 1984, was the first company to digitize the maps of the world, as part of the first commercial
automotive navigation system; the maps ultimately provided the backbone for
Google Maps,
mapquest.com, and other navigation systems; it was sold to
Rupert Murdoch in the 1980s. In May 2000 the company, headquartered in
Menlo Park, California, became a wholly owned subsidiary of
Tele Atlas. While many of the ideas eventually led to current-day innovations, most of Catalyst's companies eventually failed due to a lack of underlying technology available in the 1980s to sustain these high-tech innovations. For example, Catalyst's companies included CinemaVision, which attempted to develop high-definition television. Cumma attempted to distribute video games using special vending machines that would write the game onto discs on demand. ByVideo developed an early online shopping experience using kiosks and Laser Discs that allowed shoppers to virtually purchase products that would then be delivered later.
PlayNet/Aristo After a failed bid to purchase
Atari Games in 1996, the company which carried on Atari's arcade legacy, Nolan Bushnell became senior consultant to the small game developer Aristo International after it bought Borta, Inc., where he was chairman. Aristo's CEO and chairman was
Mouli Cohen. In association with Aristo, Bushnell spearheaded TeamNet, a line of multiplayer-only arcade machines targeted towards adults, which allowed teams of up to four players to compete either locally or remotely via internet. Aristo was later renamed PlayNet. Borta Inc. Developed video games that included versions of
Urban Strike and
Jungle Strike along with online Sports Games. Aristo developed two main products: a touchscreen interface bar-top/arcade system that would also provide internet access, phone calls, and online networked tournaments; and a digital jukebox, capable of storing thousands of songs and downloading new releases. By late 1997 the company was facing financial troubles and was planning to withdraw the units it had released in the field and relaunch the line with improvements to the credit card swipe system and internet connections. The company died shortly before the
dot-com bubble burst with its prototype machines still in development in 1997.
uWink Before BrainRush, Bushnell's most recent company was
uWink, a company that evolved out of an early project called In10City (pronounced 'Intensity') which was a concept of an entertainment complex and dining experience. uWink was started by Bushnell and his business adviser Loni Reeder, who also designed the original logo for the company. The company has gone through several failed iterations including a touch-screen kiosk design, a company to run cash and prize awards as part of their uWin concept and also an online Entertainment Systems network. After nearly 7 years and over $24 million in investor funding, the touchscreen kiosks/bartop model was closed amid complaints of unpaid prizes and lack of maintaining service agreements with locations to keep the kiosk/bartop units in working condition. The latest iteration (announced in 2005) is a new interactive entertainment restaurant called the uWink Media Bistro, whose concept builds off his Chuck E. Cheese venture and previous 1988–1989 venture Bots Inc., which developed similar systems of customer-side point-of-sale touch-screen terminals in addition to autonomous
pizza delivery robots for
Little Caesars Pizza. The plan was for guests to order their food and drinks using screens at each table, on which they may also play games with each other and watch movie trailers and short videos. The multiplayer network type video games that allowed table to table interaction or even with table group play never materialized. Guests often spotted the OSX based machine being constantly re-booted in order to play much simpler casual video games. Another factor that possibly led to the failure of the restaurants was the placement of the restaurants. The Woodland Hills location was on the second floor of a suburban shopping mall and the Hollywood location practically hidden with minimal visibility on a higher level of a shopping center complex. The first Bistro opened in
Woodland Hills, California on October 16, 2006. A second in
Hollywood was established, and in 2008 the company opened a third Southern California restaurant and one in
Mountain View, California. All the restaurants have since closed.
Atari, SA On April 19, 2010,
Atari SA, the owner of the Atari brand and its home legacy since 2001, announced that Nolan Bushnell would join the company's board of directors. It marked his
de facto return to Atari after more than 30 years.
Modal VR Bushnell is also one of the founders of Modal VR, a company that develops a portable large-scale VR system for enterprises to train e.g., security forces.
Anti-Aging Games, LLC Nolan is on the advisory board of Anti-AgingGames.com and was a co-founder of the company, featuring online memory, concentration, and focus games for healthy people over 35.
Exodexa, Inc. In 2021, Nolan founded the Exodexa adaptive learning gaming platform that delivers individualized, interactive learning experiences across Chemistry, Physics, Business Law, and History, with more than 4,000 lessons in development. ExoDexa's scalable platform is adaptable to different languages, topics and content types, empowering students to redefine learning success while providing teachers with powerful instructional tools. ==Other ventures==