Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc., and the Chuck E. Cheese chain. He 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". He has started more than 20 companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging Games. In 2012, he founded an educational software company called Brainrush that uses video game technology in educational software.

He is credited with Bushnell's Law, an aphorism about games that are "easy to learn and difficult to master" being rewarding.

Personal life

Bushnell 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. He attended Davis High School in the nearby town of Kaysville, Utah. Bushnell enrolled at Utah State University in 1961 to study engineering and then later business. In 1964, he transferred to the University of Utah College of Engineering, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

He married his first wife, Paula Rochelle Nielson, in 1966 and had two daughters. In 1969, they moved to California. They divorced in 1975 just prior to Warner Communication's purchase of Atari. Near the end of 1977, he married Nancy Nino, with whom he had six children. He also used his profit from selling Atari to Warner to purchase the former mansion of coffee magnate James Folger in Woodside, California.