Personal Life
Bushnell graduated from the University of Utah College of Engineering with a degree in electrical engineering in 1968 after transferring from Utah State University, and was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. He was one of many computer science students of the 1960s who played the historic Spacewar! game on DEC mainframe computers. The University of Utah was heavily involved in computer graphics research and spawned a wide variety of Spacewar versions.
Bushnell worked at Lagoon Amusement Park for many years in high school and college while living in his hometown of Ogden, Utah. He was particularly interested in the midway arcade games, where theme park customers would have to use skill and luck to ultimately achieve the goal and win the prize. He liked the concept of getting people curious about the game and from there getting them to pay the fee in order to play. He would use his love for games and theme parks to help launch both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza-Time Theaters.
After selling Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million, Bushnell purchased the former mansion of coffee magnate James Folger in Woodside, California, which he shared with his wife Nancy and their eight children. The Bushnells now live in Southern California.
Bushnell's oldest child, Alissa, currently works with him at uWink.
Bushnell was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but is no longer an active member. A 1999 Time article described him as a "lapsed Mormon" and described him smoking a pipe, which is frowned upon in the LDS community.
In June 2008 a new film was announced in which Leonardo DiCaprio would portray Bushnell.
At the British Academy Video Games Awards on March 10, 2009, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awarded the Academy Fellowship to Bushnell in recognition of his outstanding achievement as a founding father of the video games industry.
Bushnell was featured in the documentary film Something Ventured which premiered in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Nolan Bushnell
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