Considered the “father of the video game industry,” Nolan Bushnell joined Episode 11 of the RePlay Podcast to discuss his 50-plus years in the business. He told our host Randy Chilton that his path of entrepreneurship started when he was eight years old.
“At dinner one night, my mother said, ‘We have too many strawberries and I don’t know what we’re going to do with them,’” Bushnell recalled. “We had a garden out back. The very next day I accompanied her to the grocery store, and I noticed in the produce section they had baskets of strawberries for 50 cents. So, I went home, got all the old baskets out of the garage and picked the strawberries and sold them for 50 cents door to door. In about an hour and a half, I’d made $8 – in a world in which my allowance, per week, was 25 cents. To say the least, I was hooked.”
From that point on, he said there was always a gig or side hustle going.
One of those side hustles, of course, led to the first coin-op video game – Computer Space. It was created by Bushnell in partnership with Ted Dabney and their Syzygy Engineering, which soon became Atari. In 1972 came the game-changing video game Pong.
Be sure to check out the whole podcast here on the RePlay YouTube channel.