Nolan Bushnell, inventor of Pong and founder of Atari, is rightly considered the father of electronic gaming.

He was born in Utah on 5 feb.1940, was a typical childhood inventor. He won a third grade science project on the theme production of electricity. He nearly burned his home garage while trying to launch a roller skate mounted rocket using a home made liquid fuel. His father died when he was just fifteen, so he took over his concrete business.

Bushnell’s career plans got anew boost when he was attending the University of Utah. At that time he was learning the basic of computer graphics, while managing park and playing chess tournament side by side. He was fascinated by the combination of computers, images, and fun. Inspiring from this he went on to invent the first computerized game of human history in the year 1970. The game was named as “Computer space”. This game was like a prototype of the later launched game “Asteroids”, and was little bit of complicated and too cumbersome for launching it publicly.

So learning from that he simplified it and launch it next year as “Pong”, with the help of young computer engineer Allan alcorn. Pong was the video version of ping- pong, whose ball was a blip that bounced back and forth on the screen between two “paddles” that were moved up and down by control knobs in the hands of the players. They installed there first machine in bar in Sunnyvale, California an evening in1971. The game was proved to be a blockbuster as the machine nearly broke down after being stuffed too full with quarters.

Knowing that he had a winning product he founded a company with his friend Ted dabney with only mere 500 $ in the year 1972. games that were produced by there company in next few years, including Asteroids, gave rise to not only the video arcade, but to an entire industry which is still growing today. In 1975 Bushnell made an agreement with sears to sell home version of Pong. This was even a greater milestone, for the first time TV can be used to do something other than watching it. TV become more

In 1976, Bushnell took an intelligent decision by selling Atari to Time Warner for a whooping 28$ million dollars. By the arrival of mid 80’s Atari’s total business was more than 2 $billion dollar’s annually. Meanwhile Bushnell had already founded a company named as Chuck E. Cheese pizza restaurants (1977), which gave kids the chance to enjoy, simultaneously, the fun of playing electronic games and having fun out of eating out.

To date, Bushnell has founded 18 companies. He has worked in many fields, including personal computers and robotics; but his real love remained the same developing computer games. For example, Bushnell now works on “cybersports” internet-based game that could accommodate thousands of persons per team. Bushnell has always been convinced that computer games are an excellent way to foster your curiosity and creativity in a social context. In other words, Bushnell has always seen computer games as a mean of education. And certainly his own game crated that pavement that leads to development of today’s educational games. For his support to gaming industry he was awarded Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame. He is currently the founder and CEO of uWink, a game-based restaurant startup, and the Chairman of the board at NeoEdge Networks, an advertising-based video game company. At the very last Nolan Bushnell has revolutionized entertainment, in public and at home; and he will doubtless continue to do so. So it’s not wrong to call him father of the electronic gaming.

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