Nolan Bushnell Video Game Quotes

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

In video games you sometimes run into what they call a side quest, and if you don't manage to figure it out you can usually just go back into the normal world of the game and continue on toward your objective. I felt like I couldn't find my way back to the world now: like I was somebody locked in a meaningless side quest, in a stuck screen. ~ John Darnielle

One night, walking along 8th Street in the East Village, I saw some adolescent boys, out too late and unattended. They were playing an arcade video game set up on the sidewalk, piloting a digital spacecraft through starlit infinity, blasting everything in their path to bits. Now and then, the machine would let out a robotic shout of encouragement: You're doing great! So the urchins flew on through the make-believe nothingness, destroying whatever they saw, hypnotized by the mechanical praise that stood in for the human voice of love. That, it seemed to me, was postmodernism in a nutshell. It ignored the full spiritual reality of life all around it in order to blow things apart inside a man-made box that only looked like infinity. You're doing great, intellectuals! You're doing great. Much ~ Andrew Klavan

The video game story-development process is incredibly broken. ~ Austin Grossman

Selling Atari when I did - I think that's my biggest regret. And I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties. But I was operating under this theory at the time that the way to have an interesting life was to reinvent yourself every five or six years. ~ Nolan Bushnell

But seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have to be both fireproof and fully isolated from the plane's - so that crossed wires in somebody's seat don't allow a ten-year-old playing a video game to suddenly take control of the cockpit. Largely as a result, in-flight entertainment systems are almost unbelievably expensive. The rule of thumb, I was told, is "a thousand dollars an inch" - meaning that the small screen in the back of each economy seat can cost an airline ten thousand dollars, plus a few thousand for its handheld controller. ~ Anonymous

Pudge," she said, faux-condescending, "the sound is an integral part of the artistic experience of this video game. Muting Decapitation would be like reading only every other word of Jane Eyre. ~ John Green

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

A man chooses...a slave obeys. ~ Andrew Ryan

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

Video game fans are like nothing else. You can do so many movies or so many TV things, but video games is where there is just everyone. ~ Jillian Murray

yes, it's possible to get repetitive stress injuries from heavy computer or video game use. But they are also caused by musical instruments and by the repetitive motion of sports, according to Warren Buckleitner, editor of Children's Software Review. ~ Armin A. Brott

But stones, too, can lie. ~ Amy Hennig

I don't know how video game narrative works. ~ Tom Bissell

War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence-death-is hidden from public view. ~ Chris Hedges

Yeah, I played video games on and off for quite a few years. I played Doom and was a fan of the game and that was my prime reason for doing the film. ~ Karl Urban

Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That's it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things. ~ Nathan Hill

Failure. Never before has a thing gotten such a bad rap as failure. And why wouldn't it? It's failure. In a video game, failure means to fucking die, to drop into a pit of lava while the princess remains unsaved (oh, sexist video games, when will the lady plumber save the prince instead of the other way around?). You fail a class and it's like
*poop noise*
you failed, you're held back, time is wasted, money is lost, you suck, you stupid person. Hell with that. Failure is brilliant. Failure is how we learn. Every great success and every kick-ass creator is the product of a hundred failures, a thousand, some epic-big, some micro-tiny. We learn the right moves by taking the wrong turns. Failure should not drag you into the pits of personal despair but rather leave you empowered. Failure is an instructional manual written in scar tissue. ~ Chuck Wendig

The best thing about streaming is there are no load times during play. Once the game has loaded the player never has to wait for new maps to load. This enables the player to get more immersed in the game world as there are no loading screens to remind the player they are actually playing a video game. ~ Leslie Benzies

And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth. ~ Steve Case

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

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

It seems astounding to me now that the video games are perhaps as important as the movie themselves. And people will spend 2 or 3 years obsessing about the video game in exactly the same way that they'd be obsessing about the movie if they were working on that. ~ John Cleese

The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried. ~ Deb Caletti

Windows Updates have sometimes been a pain point for users. The update pop-ups can interrupt a movie or a video game, and the automatic restarts can result in lost data or confused users. ~ Ben Parr

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

We had some really powerful technology - Atari always was a technology-driven company, and we were very keen on keeping the technological edge on everything. There's a whole bunch of things that we innovated. We made the first computer that did stamps or sprites, we did screen-mapping for the very first time, and a lot of stuff like that. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children's sports in history. ~ Richard Louv

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

The more children see of violence, the more numb they are to the deadly consequences of violence. Now, video games like 'Mortal Kombat,' 'Killer Instinct,' and 'Doom,' the very game played obsessively by the two young men who ended so many lives in Littleton, make our children more active participants in simulated violence. ~ William J. Clinton

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

I'd rather fight Arona cause I don't know him and he's in the ******* video game and I'm not. ~ Quinton Jackson

Computers had their origin in military cryptography - in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. ~ Austin Grossman

Very few American parents give a crap about how they raise their kids. They put minimal effort into it. Who told you it's a good idea to buy a developing mind a video game? ~ Louis C.K.

The game business reinvents itself every five years. ~ Nolan Bushnell

It's been the video game ever since I got out of coaching. Even when I was an announcer, fewer and fewer people remembered me as 'Coach,' and as the years went on, people just started knowing me from the game. ~ John Madden

The dimensions of video game characters, even when they're scanned from real people, are beefed up with exaggerated proportions in games like Def Jam: Fight for NY to give them more pop. ~ Cliff Bleszinski

The other video game adaptation I did was Mortal Kombat, and I did that because I loved playing the games in the arcade. I play all of the Resident Evil games because I'm very much immersed in that world. ~ Paul W. S. Anderson

Young adults love to play games and they're thirsty for social interaction, but a lot of bar and restaurant experiences are quite unsatisfactory on the social level. What young people need is a place that has the feel of an unhosted party where they find themselves interacting with like-minded strangers. ~ Nolan Bushnell

Here it is: our collaboration with Project Spark . Instead of a traditional music video for GUILTY ALL THE SAME (feat. Rakim), we are giving you this as a starting line for you guys to create and share. This is the first interactive, remixable game. We look forward to seeing what you make with it. ~ Joe

Don't just buy a new video game, make one.
Don't just download the latest app, help design it.
Don't just play on your phone, program it. ~ Barack Obama