The Big Cheese: How a Pizza Rat changed the image of video arcades from famously fiendish to family friendly
His ‘video computer system’, a cartridge-based home video-game console designed to play versions of popular Atari arcade games, was certain to be a big hit, but in developing it he had burned through all of his company’s cash. Retailers who had made big money on Atari’s home Pong machines were interested in selling it but they wanted terms – that is, they wanted to get stock now but pay for it later. So Nolan couldn’t use pre-orders (no such thing in 1976!) to fund manufacturing and as a result the VCS was essentially dead in the water. His only solution was to sell equity to get the money to move into production.
But he was going to need to sell so much equity that he was going to lose control of Atari. Can you imagine what it was like to be Nolan Bushnell? He was going to have to sell his company in order to make it successful! Not a great decision to be forced to make.
So, in the end, he sold Atari to Warner Communications, which ponied up the cash to manufacture the VCS and the rest is history. But what happened to Nolan Bushnell? What did he do?
