He was made manager of the games department two seasons after starting. Business career Early career and Syzygy īushnell worked at Lagoon Amusement Park for many years while attending college. Bushnell said that he stopped practicing the faith after he got into a debate over the interpretation of the Bible with a professor at the U of U's Institute of Religion during college. Īlthough he was a Latter-day Saint, or Mormon, in his youth, by the time of his first divorce, he had forgone the teachings, often being called a "lapsed Mormon". He also used his profit from selling Atari to Warner to purchase the former mansion of coffee magnate James Folger in Woodside, California. Around the end of 1977, he married Nancy Nino, with whom he had six children. He and Paula divorced in 1975, just prior to Warner Communication's purchase of Atari. He married his first wife, Paula Rochelle Nielson, in 1966 and had two daughters, and in 1969, they moved to California. He was one of many computer science students of the 1960s who played the historic Spacewar! game on DEC mainframe computers. He was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. In 1964, he transferred to the University of Utah's (U of U) College of Engineering, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. Bushnell enrolled at Utah State University in 1961 to study engineering and then later business. 2.11 Global Gaming Technologies Corp (CSE - GGAM.U)īushnell was born in 1943 in Clearfield, Utah in a middle-class family who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.2.4 Catalyst Technologies Venture Capital Group.Nolan is credited with Bushnell's Law, an aphorism about games that are "easy to learn and difficult to master" being rewarding.
In 2012 he founded an educational software company called Brainrush, that is using video game technology in educational software. Bushnell has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship and the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award, and was named one of Newsweek 's "50 Men Who Changed America." Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame