Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre 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 is using 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.
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 enrolled at Utah State University in 1961 to study engineering and then later business. 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. He 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.

Return to Nolan Bushnell Autograph Profile