Bushnell is known for his relaxed manner, humor, one-liners and is regularly quoted. He often is scheduled as the after lunch speaker as he is one of the few that can keep any audience engaged. He can speak using an extensive PowerPoint with hundreds of historical pictures, current laboratory projects and future concepts.
Nolan Bushnell is often referred to as the father of the video game industry. He is best known as the founder of Atari Corporation and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater. Mr. Bushnell is passionate about enhancing and improving the educational process by integrating the latest in brain science, and truly enjoys motivating and inspiring others with his views on entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation and education.
Over the past forty years, Bushnell has been a prolific entrepreneur, founding numerous companies, including: Etak, the first car navigation system whose mapping is still the basis for car navigation systems today; Androbot, a personal robotics company; Catalyst Technologies, the first technology incubator; and ByVideo, the first online ordering system, which allowed customers to order and pay for product from kiosks. Additionally, he has consulted for numerous corporations, including IBM, Cisco Systems and US Digital Communications.
Three years ago, he published of his first book, “Finding the Next Steve Jobs”, a “how to” for people interested in finding, hiring, keeping and nurturing creative talent. Currently, Mr. Bushnell is devoting his talents to fixing education with his new company, Brainrush. His beta software is teaching academic subjects at over 10 times the speed in classrooms with over 90% retention. He uses his experience from gaming industry to introduce video game metrics to addict learners to academic subjects. His Anti Aging games project helps seniors to avoid many of the problems of mental aging through game exercises that maintain mental flexibility and problem solving. He was most recently featured in the New Yorker magazine for this effort.
During his carreer, Nolan has garnered many distinctions and awards. He was inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame, inducted into the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, named ASI 1997 Man of the Year, and named one of Newsweek’s “50 Men That Changed America.” In March of 2009, Bushnell was honored with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Fellowship Award (BAFTA) the highest accolade the Academy bestows, for his outstanding creative contribution to the Video Games Industry. He was similarly honored with a LARA award from the German Academy of Entertainment. He is also highlighted as one of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial icons in “The Revolutionaries” display at the renowned Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.
Currently a biopic about Nolan Bushnell, titled Atari, is in pre-production. The story was acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company and in role of Nolan Bushnell is DiCaprio himself.