Bruno Bonnell

Bruno Bonnell is a French personality, one of the founders of Infogrames Entertainment SA. A qualified chemical engineer, Bonnell received a degree in economics at the Université Paris IX. He began his long career on the Thomson TO7, one of the earliest French-produced home computers, before founding Infogrames in June 1983 at the age of 25 with Christophe Sapet and Thomas Schmider. He has been chairman and chief creative officer of the company from 1983 to April 5, 2007. He was also chief executive officer of the company – a position he has held since 1983 until a stockholder vote in 2003 showed a lack of confidence in Bonnell’s management of the company’s debts. He stepped down as CEO of Atari (while retaining his other two positions in IESA) in 2004 to be replaced by James Caparro, although he took up the position again on a temporary basis when Caparro resigned in June 2005. On September 5, 2006, David Pierce was appointed as new CEO of Atari.

In 1995, Bonnell was elected president of the Syndicat des Editeurs de Logiciels de Loisirs (SELL), a French games developers' association.

He has worked together with French broadcaster Canal Plus to create the television channel Game One, which was specifically aimed at a gaming audience. Intended as a European channel, Game One has however only been broadcast in the French language.

Bonnell is known for spearheading many of the takeovers of many smaller (and a few larger) development studios over the 1980s and 1990s, most notably British development house Ocean Software and Atari, as well as GT Interactive, Accolade, Gremlin Graphics and Hasbro Interactive. All of these companies were integrated into the Infogrames infrastructure with most of the brand names completely disappearing, with one exception – Atari, which Bonnell felt was far too valuable a brand name to simply disintegrate into the Infogrames name. It was for this reason that Infogrames began using the Atari brand on games published around Christmas release 2001 and was renamed to Atari, Inc. in the US in the year 2003.

Beyond his involvement in Infogrames & Atari, Bonnell is also a shareholder in Lyon's soccer team : the Olympique Lyonnais.

On April 5, 2007, Bonnell resigned from his positions at Atari and Infogrames. On the day of the announcement of his departure IESA's shares jumped 24%.

In June 2008, Bonnell joined zSlide, a company based near Paris.

Bruno Bonnell is currently working for Robopolis, a Lyon based company distributing robots.