Nolan Bushnell: belief

Transcript context

…Let's go into our section, after history and facts. This is an illustrious, amazing history and facts. What we tend to talk about now is what would have happened otherwise? The way that I want to frame this in this episode is, what if Atari was never started? How do you think this crazy enormous video game industry that we have today? I'm sure you've thought about this before. There's one view of it that it wouldn't exist at all and probably not true. There's another view that it would be no different than it is today, which is also probably not true. What do you think is the middle there? I think that there's a 90% probability that there would a video game post the 6502 microprocessor. I think that the technology had progressed point where it was pretty simple. The secret sauce that I provided is to figure out how to do it with state machine technology, which wasn't an obvious thing to most engineers. I think that was my unique contribution that is far enough out of the mainstream that it may never have happened, or it may, you just never know. I would say that we were running down the hallway of a hotel and you're checking all the doors and sometimes, there's a broom closet. Most of the time it's a regular room, but every once in a while there's a ballroom. You're not there alone. There are many people running down those same streets. I think it's extremely arrogant to think that you were definitive in something. I read somewhere, I don't know if it's true, I think this was after you left Atari after the acquisition that there was potentially a deal on the table for Atari to be the US manufacturer and distributor for the Nintendo Entertainment System for the Famicom.…

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