Nolan Bushnell famous quotes

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

#Passion #Training #Intensity

The true entrepreneur is a doer
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Entrepreneur #Doers

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

#Ideas #People #Entrepreneur

The ultimate inspiration is the deadline.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Motivational #Death #Inspiration

Everyone who's ever taken a shower has an idea. It's the person who gets out of the shower, dries off and does something about it who makes a difference.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Inspirational #Success #Business

People like secrets. Creative people really like secrets.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#People #Creative #Secret

I just want the future to happen faster. I can't imagine the future without robots.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Robots #Want #Imagine

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

#Airplane #People #Innovation

If you're willing to work harder than anybody else, you can create your own luck
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Hard Work #Luck #Work Harder

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

#Technology #Years #Forever

Creativity is every company's first driver. It's where everything starts, where energy and forward motion originate. Without that first charge of creativity, nothing else can take place.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Creativity #Firsts #Energy

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

#Fun #Games #Two

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.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Progress #Trying #Needs

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

#Book #Ideas #Firsts

Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese's were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#School #College #Jail

I always loved both 'Breakout' and 'Asteroids' - I thought they were really good games. There was another game called 'Tempest' that I thought was really cool, and it represented a really hard technology. It's probably one of the only colour-vector screens that was used in the computer graphics field at that time.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Technology #Games #Vectors

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

#College #Games #Amusement

I've been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants, communications systems, touch screens, and now I'm back in games. I like to say I have five-year A.D.D.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Communication #Years #Games

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

#Mistake #Thinking #Two

In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E. Cheese's, was thriving and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house on the Champ de Mars in Paris, right between the Eiffel Tower and the Ecole Militaire. The home was quite amazing: At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Home #Swimming #Paris

In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory - and I think it's pretty well borne out - is that in the '80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Thinking #Games #Video

If you really want you people to innovate, buy a science fiction book, tear off the covers, and tell them it's history.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Money #Book #People

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

#Scary #Innovation #Radical

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

#Sweet #People #Noise

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

#Play #Games #Brands

A lot of what is wrong with corporate America has to do with a culture filled with antibodies trained to expel anything different. HR departments often want cookie cutter employees, which inevitably results in cookie cutter solutions.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#America #Cookies #Want

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

#School #Games #Metrics

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

#Father #Men #Boss

I want to fix education in the world. As soon as I work on that, I am going to work on world hunger and then world peace.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Want #World #Hunger

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

#Believe #Thinking #Innovation

'Grand Theft Auto', in its deification of antisocial behavior, is where I heap the most of my scorn.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Behavior #Antisocial #Theft

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

#Ego #Mind #Looks

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they're being edited out of importance.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Believe #I Believe #Importance

I'd love to design a school.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#School #Design

I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Vision #Trying #Figures

You wanna build your IQ higher in the next two years? Be uncomfortable. That means, learn something where you have a beginner's mind.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Mean #Two #Years

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

#Powerful #Nice #Thinking

I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Soul #Awful #Culture

I guess I'd like to be known for being an innovator, fostering creativity, thinking outside the box. You know, keeping people playful.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Creativity #Thinking #People

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

#Eye #Years #Feels

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

#School #Order #Class

I've always been a tech-head.
-- Nolan Bushnell

I'm the only one who was predicting the Nintendo Wii would beat Sony's PlayStation 3.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Wii #Nintendo #Sony

I'm glad to see the casual game play coming back now on the Internet, games that aren't violent, that aren't complex that you can sit down and you can have some fun.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Fun #Games #Play

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

#Addiction #Way #Example

A lot of people think that success is luck and being in the right place at the right time. But I think if you’re willing to work harder than anybody else, you can create an awful lot of your own luck.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Hard Work #Thinking #People

The true entreprenuer is a doer,not a dreamer.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Dreamer #Doers

If you don't hire at least one or two people that are smarter than you are, then you're a terrible manager and I don't need you.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Business #Two #People

The best ideas lose their owners and take on lives of their own.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Acceptance #Ideas #Rejection

When it kind of went to 'Street Fighter', where you had to push 13 buttons with all 13 of your fingers and ripped the spine out of somebody, you know, violent games lost the women. Complexity lost the casual gamer.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Games #Buttons #Fighter

Walk to work, even if it's four miles. Ride a bike to work. Drive a different way. On your way there, try to find beauty. You'd be surprised how much more of the neighborhood you can perceive and experience when you're looking for unique spots of beauty.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Unique #Trying #Different

The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren't always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I've come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as 'lame.'
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Children #Ideas #Parent

One of the big concerns I have is that most of the HR departments in a lot of companies are hiring away from creativity and they don't know it. For instance, they are requiring everybody to have a college degree. The most creative people I know couldn't deal with college.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Creativity #College #People

Creativity in life is about saying yes to new ideas.
-- Nolan Bushnell

#Creativity #Ideas #Saying Yes