[5] 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 was also interested in the Midway arcade games, where theme park customers would have to use skill and luck to ultimately achieve the goal and win the prize.

They made an agreement with Nutting Associates, a maker of coin-op trivia and shooting games, that produced a fiberglass cabinet for the unit that included a coin-slot mechanism.

Bushnell also knew that the next game they developed would need to be simpler and not require users to read instructions on the cabinet, since their target audience would likely be drunken bar patrons.

They rented their first office on Scott Boulevard in Sunnyvale, California, contracted with Bally Manufacturing to create a video game and a pinball table, and hired their second employee, engineer Allan Alcorn.

Pong proved to be very popular; Atari released a large number of Pong-based arcade video games over the next few years as the mainstay of the company.

[37] Kassar created successful advertising and marketing throughout 1978, positioning the Atari VCS for a larger sales period at the end of the year.

[37] However, Bushnell had concerns on Kassar's plans and feared they had produced too many units to be sold, and at a board meeting with Warner near the end of the year, reiterated this position.

Bushnell recommended that funds be used in R&D for developing a new, technologically superior console, as he feared rising competition would make the aging tech specs of the VCS obsolete.

Bushnell's concerns never materialized as a combination of Kassar's marketing and the popularity of Taito's Space Invaders at the arcade drove Atari VCS sales.

Both Warner Communications and Bushnell commonly recognized he was no longer a good leader for the company, removing him as CEO and Chairman in early 1979.

In 1981 Bushnell turned over day-to-day food operations of Chuck E. Cheese's to a newly hired restaurant executive and focused on Catalyst Technologies.

Nolan tried to step back in, blaming the money problems on over-expansion, too much tweaking of the formula and saturation in local markets by the management team.

He resigned in February 1984, when the board of directors rejected his proposed changes, and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater (now named after its famous rat mascot) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March of 1984.

In the late 1980s, Axlon managed the development of two new games for the Atari 2600, most likely as part of a marketing attempt to revive sales of the system, already more than a decade old.

ByVideo developed an early online shopping experience using kiosks and Laser Discs that allowed shoppers to virtually purchase products that would then be delivered later.

In association with Aristo, Bushnell spearheaded TeamNet, a line of multiplayer-only arcade machines targeted towards adults, which allowed teams of up to four players to compete either locally or remotely via internet.

Aristo developed two main products: a touchscreen interface bar-top/arcade system that would also provide internet access, phone calls, and online networked tournaments;[47] and a digital jukebox, capable of storing thousands of songs and downloading new releases.

[48] By late 1997 the company was facing financial troubles and was planning to withdraw the units it had released in the field and relaunch the line with improvements to the credit card swipe system and internet connections.

[50] After nearly 7 years and over $24 million in investor funding, the touchscreen kiosks/bartop model was closed amid complaints of unpaid prizes and lack of maintaining service agreements with locations to keep the kiosk/bartop units in working condition.

The latest iteration (announced in 2005) is a new interactive entertainment restaurant called the uWink Media Bistro, whose concept builds off his Chuck E. Cheese venture and previous 1988–1989 venture Bots Inc., which developed similar systems of customer-side point-of-sale touch-screen terminals in addition to autonomous pizza delivery robots for Little Caesars Pizza.

The plan was for guests to order their food and drinks using screens at each table, on which they may also play games with each other and watch movie trailers and short videos.

Guests often spotted the OSX based machine being constantly re-booted in order to play much simpler casual video games.

Nolan is on the advisory board of Anti-AgingGames.com and was a co-founder of the company,[55] featuring online memory, concentration, and focus games for healthy people over 35.

[73] That day, several people through social media, including Brianna Wu, claimed Bushnell fostered a toxic work environment at Atari for women that became the foundation for the then-future video game industry, based on several documented interviews and accounts of Atari at the time of the 1970s and 1980s; a notable example was of Bushnell holding board meetings in a hot tub and invited female secretaries to join them.

Wu and others asserted that while Bushnell had done much for the industry, recognizing him with this type of award during the ongoing #MeToo movement was sending the wrong message.

[75] Bushnell released a statement agreeing with the committee's decision:[78] I applaud the GDC for ensuring that their institution reflects what is right, specifically with regards to how people should be treated in the workplace.

All who agreed that while the company's 1970s and 1980s workplace was influenced by the broader Sexual Revolution, the allegations made against Bushnell were exaggerated or false, and that the culture was one that they all freely participated in.

[75] Some stated that those who accused Bushnell of sexism did not take into consideration the culture of the time, and there was a clear and distinct difference between the sexualized occurrences at Atari in the 1970s, and the real harassment and threats faced by women in the current #MeToo movement.

[75] In an editorial, Dean Takahashi suggested the current environment within the video game industry was more heavily influenced by Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, which took drastically different approaches to workplace culture.