Atari Alumni

Videogame names don’t come much bigger than Nolan Bushnell. The legendary entrepreneur cemented his place in history with the founding of Atari almost 40 years ago, bringing arcade classic Pong to the world and spawning a multibillion-dollar industry. Bushnell spoke with Yahoo! Games about the timeless appeal of Atari’s newly-remixed Missile Command, and pointed out the lessons modern developers can still learn from the classic designs of yore.

Yahoo! Games: Did you have any involvement in the original Missile Command when it was released?

Nolan Bushnell: The coin-op version, I did. Missile Command was one of those wonderful products that was timely in a very interesting way – the worry about nuclear holocaust was real. The Cold War was rampant. We actually got some criticism, you know, “The End” [the game-over screen] – people thought it was a little too dire of a prediction. But it was a fun game. Like the way a smell will sometimes put you back in a particular time and place in your memory, playing the Missile Command re-do transported me back to my office, playing Missile Command with some buddies, and boy, I was right there again. I remember that I was a better player then than I am now, but age tends to do that.

YG: When you think of the iconic games of the time, Missile Command is right there because it tied in so well with the Cold War paranoia of that era. It’s one of those images of a videogame screen from those days that really resonated.

NB: Absolutely. And it was actually an interesting game, because it was one of the early games that used a microprocessor. And so all of a sudden we found ourselves able to have a lot more objects on the screen, and things that were not possible in the early architectures.

Read the full interview »