
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on why life is 'a game' - tagawa
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33117769
======
jen729w
_> "How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's
zero, I wouldn't invest in you," he says of their entrepreneurial verve._

Jesus christ, really? That sounds like a hideous childhood to me. Is this what
we're becoming, a race of people obsessed with capital and business and work?

Go play in the dirt and ride your bike, kid. Work when you're old.

~~~
prawn
Goes hand-in-hand with his other quote: "I have made so many massive mistakes
of ego, I can't tell you."

~~~
fezz
I stopped reading it because it was very clear that his ego is still giant.
And it's not surprising that the Steam circus has some of the same ego issues.

------
ux-app
> "I've always valued passionate employees over anything else, and, it turns
> out that there's a huge percentage of the population that are actually dead
> - they don't know it, but, in terms of their processes, they're just waiting
> to be buried"

I'm sure he did value passionate employees, especially in light of the
positive way in which describes Jobs sleeping under his desk (and the poor
bastards described in the article who were working on a Saturday). I wonder
how many of those under the desk employees got a cut of his $30 million Atari
payday. Not one I bet.

Wisdom is understanding that others don't have the same drives and ambitions
that you do and not judging them for it. Sounds like this guy still hasn't
learned this at 70+

~~~
gexla
This was just one step in an incredible journey for Steve Jobs. He probably
put in the long hours because he saw value in those hours. He probably learned
a lot from the experience.

~~~
scholia
Yep. Like getting Woz (who had a day job) to come in out of hours and do a lot
of the work, then take the credit for it, and then not give Woz a fair share
of the bonus...

[http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-
atari...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-
bonus-267711)

------
DigitalSea
Sheesh, this guy has been in the industry longer than most at age 72 and it
shocked me when I read, "a handful of young men are eagerly banging away on
keyboards late on a Saturday afternoon" \- then to top it all off further into
the article he says, "How many companies have you started by the time you're
18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you," he says of their
entrepreneurial verve (after explaining pretty much everything he did post-
Atari was a mistake).

Crunch does not make for efficiency. Look at EA if you want to see what crunch
does (besides make your employees and families miserable). Sounds like
Bushnell has made a lot of mistakes in his time and his latest startup and the
way it is being run is another example of a man who clearly has lost touch
with the industry he help kickstart back in the 70's.

~~~
michaelkeenan
> it shocked me when I read, "a handful of young men are eagerly banging away
> on keyboards late on a Saturday afternoon"

It's not so unreasonable to work on a Saturday afternoon. As PG says, "If
you’re ever unsure if you should be doing what you’re doing during YC, ask
yourself this question: ‘Am I building our product? Am I talking to users? Am
I exercising?’. if you’re not doing one of these things, you’re doing the
wrong thing."

> Crunch does not make for efficiency. Look at EA if you want to see what
> crunch does

I don't know much about EA but their stock value seems okay:

[https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1438113600000&chddm=2568780&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NASDAQ:EA&ntsp=0&ei=FhO_VbDaMLH2iQLPy6D4Aw)

(Though if the recent rise is due to changed policies around crunchtime, that
would be really interesting and I'd love to learn about that.)

~~~
pjc50
_Stock value seems okay_

Stock value being, of course, the only moral determinant here. Even if you're
using employees as a consumable, ea_spouse passim.

------
dbpokorny
I'm surprised that HN hasn't applied some version of the standard critique of
Capitalism already. It's practically de rigueur in fashionable intellectual
circles. And in this case it's so easy, an amateur like me can make a decent
stab at it.

First of all, we enter the text with a remark about "mistakes of ego". One ego
mistake is to conflate "life" with some activity that is taken to be "life-
defining" or "the meaning of life". This is a Western preoccupation that stems
from Christian spiritual angst with respect to the relationship between "good
works" and salvation (this is very complex, see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism)
for details and note the differences between the Catholic and Protestant
teachings. The psychological implications of the doctrinal differences are far
beyond my ability to untangle).

So here this is applied as follows: conflating life with the process of
gaining salvation through good works which in a Capitalist society translates
into "game playing" a.k.a. using capital to innovate and earn a return on
investment.

Of course none of this helps when it comes time to contemplate mortality. It
doesn't matter how much you play nor how many times you win, you'll still be
stuck with this over-developed existential angst which was the thing that
prodded you to work so hard in the first place.

> When you lose a game of chess, you don't go and jump off a bridge, you reset
> the pieces and do it again.

> It's a game

The game playing, the "reset the pieces", the conflation of life with the
game, and the talk of suicide seem to suggest an element unacknowledged in the
text, the idea of the cycle of death and rebirth. It may be a coincidence, but
I think the attitude of the Buddhists with respect to this cycle may be
connected with their attitude toward games vs. the process by which wisdom
arises, but who knows?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddha_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddha_games)

OK, that's my critique. How did I score?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Bushnell sees dead people.

Perhaps he's right, but maybe not in the way he expects.

~~~
goldenkey
It's hard for anyone in a capitalist society, stuck in the socio-sick-
environment to erase the conflation of monetary success with freedom. So we
falsely assume a grind, a saturday crunch, for the "small" underdog-company-
spin-of-the-wheel means that you have a company of all loyal, blood-brotherly
employees. It's a nice thought if 1) the company ends up being successful, and
2) the employees actually have a bit of equity. But most of the time, these
spiritual kind of ideas and feelings are just abused to justify treating
employees like shit to exact a capitalistic work efficiency from them. It's
definitely an airy kind of issue. And I'm not sold on the whole 'crunch'
thing. Though as a programmer, when I work on my own projects, I know that
crunching means I'm passionate. So it's very hard to separate that and have
some solidarity for a normal work situation where I have balance and yet feel
as if I'm not just "sucking" on the situation for a slow rolling accomodating
situation, and well, that whole 'slow burial.' Maybe I am just slowly rotting
away with my current passion for work. Just maybe..

------
lemming
_How many companies have you started by the time you 're 18? If the answer's
zero, I wouldn't invest in you._

 _After his breakout success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr Bushnell
made several missteps that eventually led to some entrepreneurial failures and
financial ruin._

That's fine, I wouldn't invest in you, either.

~~~
RabidSquirrel
Losing 30 million sounds like a much better (negative) indicator on whether to
invest in someone than how many companies they started by 18.

------
lordfoom
>"I want Jobs and [Bill] Gates and [Mark] Zuckerberg and all of these guys to
thank me for blazing some of [those trails], because it was much easier once
there were several notable successes from [people] in their twenties," he
says.

>But with that success came hubris.

No kidding.

------
cjbprime
I love the tar cheatsheet in the background of the photo.

------
burritofanatic
I was expecting his argument about how life is a really simulation, still a
good read nonetheless.

------
sorval
Nolan Bushnell made terrible pizza. soapbox denied.

------
jay_kyburz
Best line of the article.

    
    
        "I think part of the reason [Steve Jobs] smelled bad was 'cause he wouldn't necessarily go home every day."

------
vezzy-fnord
tar(1) flags as a blackboard prop, that's nice. I wouldn't consider them that
complicated to warrant being a background image of such a nature, though.

~~~
sliverstorm
Complicated? Just easy to forget. Esoteric unimportant details.

I can sympathize. I have 4-5 languages I write once a month or so. Each has a
different "if" syntax, and a different "for" syntax. Pretty soon I'm going to
cave and write myself a little reference note like that.

(Yeah, yeah, I'm sure any real ninjapirate worth his salt can perfectly recall
every syntax rule of every language he's ever written)

~~~
mikekchar
I don't think I can program in _any_ language any more. I seem to just
instinctively copy the syntax of the code around where I'm typing. I never
notice myself doing it because when I'm adding or modifying code, it never
enters my mind. When I have to write new code I'm always in a dither - "Do I
need parentheses here?", etc. It's very strange. I blame writing a lot of ruby
and javascript code (jumping back and forth to coffeescript), whose syntax is
often seemingly random :-P.

Slightly off topic, when I'm pair programming in ruby, I often say to the
other person: "No you can't break the line there!" The other person rightly
shows me that it works fine. Then they say, "Why did you think you can't do
that?" My answer is always, "OMG... what kind of insane parser have they
written to allow _that_ to work".

------
touristtam
I am surprise to find any article of the beebs on HN.

------
anonbanker
ITT: Twentysomethings guffaw about a man who has more success in his
_failures_ than they have experienced in their lives.

