An Interview with Nolan Bushnell

Gemperlein: You once said of Atari after it got all screwed up, something about the paralysis of perfection. Do you remember saying that? And what does that phrase mean?
Bushnell: What happens is that many companies become sales-proof because they can never stop perfecting a product. Products are never perfect at the day they ship. And to assume that they are just says that you never ship.

I almost ignited my family garage with a liquid fuel rocket that I had mounted on a roller skate that took off and crashed into the back of the garage and cracked the fuel container.

What happened at Atari is they kind of went from, you know, after I sold it, they continued to coast up to $2 billion in sales and nobody there that was left really understood why. They kind of thought it was their brilliance. But what really happened is the products had been created, and it was just a matter of marketing them.

When it came time to introduce a new product, no product looks like it's going to be a billion-dollar seller when you first enter the market. If you say, we're only going to market products that will sell $20 million or above, a lot of products don't look like that. . . . So, they essentially wouldn't let anything out of the lab that didn't match an unrealistic hurdle rate. And so, as a result -- every product has a life cycle -- and if you're not introducing new stuff, you die. You wither. And it was really sad to see it.

Gemperlein: Did you have a science fair project that exploded?
Bushnell: Well, not a science fair, per se. But I almost ignited my family garage with a liquid fuel rocket that I had mounted on a roller skate that took off and crashed into the back of the garage and cracked the fuel container. And all of a sudden this bright orange fireball came shooting out of the front of the garage, and I thought that I was dead. Nice thing about it was that it was such volatile fuel that it just flashed, and there wasn't enough heat there to really ignite anything. Let's just call it more luck than good judgment.
I'm really amazed that I have all my fingers and eyes.
Scheinman: Were you always interested in tinkering with things?
Bushnell: Oh, yes. My back yard was one of the few that had a working block house. Electronic ignition systems. I'm really amazed that I have all my fingers and eyes.