David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And certainly the father of the video games industry. We had a chance to interview Nolan back in 2019 on the show. You can find that episode in our back catalog. He is such a character. You can't understand him without listening to him. He is one of a kind. Nolan grows up in Utah, of all places, in the 1950s. He's just from birth this incredible hustler and entrepreneur. One of the jobs that he gets growing up is working at carnivals. He's literally a carny. He keeps referring to himself as a carny in our interview with him, which is fun. Arcade games back then in the 50s and 60s were not what we think of arcade games today. They were what's called electromechanical games. These are things like everything from you shoot the water gun to make the balloons pop, to little lights and stuff going on, you swing the hammer to hit the bell. They were games and they might have involved some circuitry components, lights and sounds, but they were not video games. Lots of bars had games like this, they were something to do at bars. In fact, one of the leading companies that made these electromechanical games back in the day was a company called Sega, which will come up later. Nolan, in addition to having this incredible entrepreneurial streak and background in arcades, does something pretty unique. He goes to college at the University of Utah and majors in electrical engineering. This was a pretty special place in the department to be in at that time. Other folks who came out of the University of Utah engineering school around this time, Alan Kay, Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, Ed Catmull of Pixar... All of which have been protagonists of Acquired episodes.…

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