In Defense of Nolan

By Glenn Saunders, 1997

In November 1997, Glenn Saunders and I were in a discussion over how much of a contribution Nolan Bushnell made to the early days of Atari. While I considered Nolan to be mainly a manager who gathered a number of engineers, Glenn wrote an essay defending him as a true leader and visionary. With just some minor HTML formatting from me, here is Glenn's passionate response...

There is a lot of anti-Bushnell rhetoric on the net lately, and I suppose it makes sense since since he did steal the Pong idea and never did a heck of a lot of engineering, per se.

And I won't argue over his track record since 78. But the fact is that you need a gameplan to build a new company and you need a vision to go forward with it. It is a lot of hard work! I'm working for a Web-based startup company and am seeing this kind of experiment happen right before my eyes. Business is like a very careful game of chess, and the executive is the man at the top making all the risky moves, and while the employees are the ones who really have to move, the fate of the company is mostly up to the strategists. A great engineer or programmer could very well see his talents squandered or misdirected under poor management. The queen could get taken, the rooks pinned in a corner, the knights given up in an even exchange.

For instance, under Warner management, the soon-to-be Activision crew were conscripted to design an operating system for the Atari 400/800. This was chinese water torture for Larry Kaplan, although Al Miller seemed to enjoy the change of pace. But this was clearly wasting the resources of people who should have been writing games, not OSs, let alone the legitimacy of making the 400/800 a home computer vs. a hybrid system or 2600 successor as it was originally intended by the engineers. As great as the 400/800 was as a home computer, the entire 8-bit system never did bring Atari the same returns as the VCS -- but it could have. At one time Atari was the largest employer in Silicon Valley, and Activision would not have been able to be the fastest growing startup in history if not for the phenomenal success of the VCS as a platform and how it was powerful enough, cheap enough, and had enough talented coders writing for it to generate the first videogame boom.

And when they had a chance to retarget the 400/800 as a console before it was out of date, they shot themselves in the foot again with the deliberately incompatible 5200. Ultimately the XEGS was just too little too late and the rest is history with the Amiga/ST swap, etc. This was not a failure of programming or engineering. This was clearly a case of demonstrating the importance of good leadership and the gap that Nolan's leaving Atari may have provided.

To repeat, Bushnell was the leader of Atari. As much as I respect the engineers and programmers, I don't think it's fair to downplay the role of an executive just because all he does is lead. Leadership is important, and wonderful programmers and engineers can be stifled and wasted under poor management, which was certainly the case which led to the creation of Activision and Imagic after Bushnell left.

He made countless executive decisions which were ultimately reflected in the final product of the Atari 2600, and hence the kernel of Atari's success as a company. The 2600's success traces itself all the way back to Pong. It benefitted greatly from the wisdom (and engineering braintrust) that Atari gained during the early years (and also by going through the teething process of the pitfalls of designing dedicated home units, which precipitated the need for a programmable system). They gained wisdom about what a videogame should be, and how a videogame archetecture should be best designed. One need only look at the failures such as the Astrocade or the Fairchild Channel F or the Oddyssey^2 to see how much the 2600 was a very very intelligent design that anticipated the needs of the evolving videogame market.

I don't think it was one big accident. The "vision thing" was definitely set by Bushnell and Alcorn, and the engineers and programmers worked under very specific sets of criteria and restrictions to deliver the goods. I got the sense when I was interviewing him that he sacrificed his control of the company in order to free up the capital via the Warner's deal to be able to launch the VCS properly. He recognized how important the stella project was to Atari's future. It was a different situation compared to making small quantities of expensive arcade machines to order. Sony knows these economic realities, but even then I think Nolan realized that his company was not large enough to be able to supply a mainstream consumer electronics device without signifant outside investment.

Sure, he wound up a very rich man because of this, but in the process he was eventually ostracized from the company and the game business as a byproduct of this deal. There is an element of pathos there, especially when you consider that Atari was really Nolan's one true success and he could never either get back, nor could he create something like it over again from scratch. (He didn't know this then, but he definitely knows it now.) He only hovered on the fringes. His VCS development for Atari Corp. was just a token gesture, and the CDTV thing was symbolic of Nolan's remaining loyalty for the original engineers (Jay Miner and company) and thus a fondness for the Amiga machines which continues to this day.

Considering that the VCS was the only true hit that Atari ever had in the console market, I think Nolan deserves a lot of credit for making that happen, and absolved of guilt over the errors in judgement that Warner made regarding the destiny of the 400/800, the programmer exodus, and losing the Amiga and the core engineers. To some extent, the slow death of Atari was necessary in order for the VCS to see the light of day. It's easy to criticize, but unless you yourself are forced into contemplating a deal with the "bean counters" to bring your creation to life, I don't think you can really understand the difficult decisions involved in translating a small independently owned company into a large and successful corporation. Ultimately very few if any survive the transition without losing their soul, and Atari was no exception. Bill Gates built Microsoft into a monster because he is a ruthless capitalist who will step on anyone and do anything required to succeed. I think Nolan and Al preferred to maintain more of their humanity.

I have first-hand accounts from Atari veterans who have gone on to work in countless other computer industry jobs who look back at the early years of Atari with fondness and nostalgia. Despite the modest pay, it was a very free and creative experience.

Nolan speculated about what he would have done had he maintained more control of Atari. Certainly he has the benefit of foresight now, and can say all the right things, but nobody was telling him during the interviews, "hey, you never felt this way back then" so I have no reason to suspect he wouldn't have followed this plan, and had he done so, I think the history of Atari would have been much brighter.

Really, people simply do not realize that Warner Atari had to really try to run the company in the ground to kill it! They wasted tremendous amounts of money on licensing and R&Ding vaporware and what did come out was often flawed in some way that really hobbled the company in the long run. This was why Nolan left. He could see what was going to happen even early on, and he didn't want to go down with the ship. Even if Nolan were a mediocre manager, he would have been able to ride the wave of Atari's success much better than Ray Kassar, and hence would have been more prepared to deal with the crash (which probably wouldn't have occured anyway).

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