Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell
Bushnell in 2013
Born	Nolan Kay Bushnell (1943-02-05) February 5, 1943 (age 74) Clearfield, Utah
Residence	Southern California
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Electrical Engineering Computer software
Institutions	Atari Chuck E. Cheese's
Alma mater	University of Utah Stanford Business School
Known for	Pong
Notable awards	Video Game Hall of Fame Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame
Children	7

Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American electrical engineer and businessman. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. 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. He is currently on the board of Anti-Aging Games, but his latest venture is an educational software company called Brainrush that is using video game technology in educational software, incorporating real brain science, in a way that Bushnell believes will fundamentally change education. Nolan, who is co-founder and chairman of Brainrush, believes that Brainrush will be his biggest success.

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

Bushnell graduated from the University of Utah College of Engineering with a degree in electrical engineering in 1968 after transferring from Utah State University, and was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He was one of many computer science students of the 1960s who played the historic Spacewar! game on DEC mainframe computers. The University of Utah was heavily involved in computer graphics research and spawned a wide variety of Spacewar versions.