The Second Coming of Nolan Bushnell

after seven years of exile, the man who created the video-game boom is back with a new bag of tricks, can he make lightning strike twice?

"Attention. Passengers." a voice announces. "Next stop in the Tunnel of Love: Italy!" Soon an enormous singing female-robot pig with a French accent is confessing, "I keep dreaming of Sorrento. . . ."

The lunchtime crowd here at Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre in Sunnyvale, California, is divided between men in their 20s and 30s and girls in their 11s and 12s. Most of the men are in the next room playing video games (of course). Most of the girls and I are chewing on pieces of pizza and listening to Italian love songs. On the walls above us, a pair of elephant feet are clapping, an assortment of cymbals and skillets is being (continued on page 134)Nolan Bushnell(continued from page 128) pounded on and flags of the United States, Italy, California and the Confederate States of America are waving furiously, making a sound like laundry snapping on a line. I turn to a prepossessing preteenager sitting near me and ask her what she thinks. She swallows a mouthful of pizza and sighs, "It's awesome."

Call me sentimental, but I find it vaguely reassuring that little girls in America can still be swept off their feet by a roomful of robots singing That's Amore. Drugs, atom bombs, Nancy Reagan, law schools--how riled up can you get if you know the old-fashioned values are intact? Maybe the future won't be scary and terrible after all.

The source of this uplifting optimism is Chuck E. Cheese, a computer-controlled mechanical rat that was supposed to be something else. "We thought he was a coyote," says Nolan Bushnell, Pizza Time's founder. It takes a certain amount of moxie to name a restaurant after a rodent, even if you do it by mistake. But Bushnell has never lacked for moxie. You may remember him as the man who turned $500 into a company called Atari. Or as the man who sold the same company four years later for $28,000,000. Or as the man who invented the video game (now, that would be something to tell your grandchildren).

So what's a guy like that doing selling pizzas? For one thing, he's making a fortune. Before Bushnell came along, the single inescapable fact about the pizza business was that every order took 20 tedious minutes to fill. Your typical Big Mac is ready and waiting before your typical McDonald's customer has found a place to park his car. But pizza takes time. Stop by a Pizza Hut on your way home from work and you'll see a lot of hungry people drumming their fingers on the tables, watching the ice melt in their Cokes.

Bushnell had the imagination to see that dead time as an asset, not a liability. (And you wonder why you aren't rich.) Why not give those cranky people something to do for 20 minutes? Even more to the point, why not give them something to do that costs money? So Bushnell built an oversized pizza parlor--he prefers to think of it as an undersized Disneyland--and filled it with video games, miniature amusement-park rides and a chorus of performing robots. Today, there are more than 200 Pizza Time Theatres in the United States, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong. An average outlet rakes in more money every year than an average McDonald's, and it can turn a profit nine times that of a traditional chain pizzeria. By 1986, Buslmell predicts, there will be 1000 Pizza Time Theatres world-wide.

When Bushnell hit the jackpot with Atari back in the mid-Seventies, a lot of Wall Street types dismissed him as just another lucky Californian who had stumbled out of a hot tub and into a pot of gold. But now that he's made a second killing, the people with the serious money are looking at him very carefully. More specifically, they're rubbing their hands and waiting for this coming October, when his seven-year noncompete agreement with Atari expires. People who attach themselves to Bushnell have a disquieting tendency to become extremely rich overnight. And while he hasn't exactly been sitting on his hands since he left Atari, there is a certain expectation that the real bonanza won't begin until he's entirely on his own again.

In the words of the man himself, "We'll blow your socks off."

•

"Robotics," said Bushnell helpfully, like the grownup in The Graduate who tells Dustin Hoffman to check out plastics. We were sitting in about 15 rooms at The Plaza in New York. Bushnell was puffing on a pipe with such intensity that it was sometimes difficult to see his face. To judge from the cloud, he was smoking coal. He is a large man, 40 years old, with dark, curly hair and a dark, curly beard. He has a deep, friendly laugh. He owns, but was not wearing, a top hat that he affects on occasion. Once or twice, he rose from his seat and strode powerfully around the room like some thitherto-undocumented species of bear. This is a man who has so many ideas that he finds sleep personally insulting. He was being interviewed by someone who takes naps when he isn't tired.

"Robotics are probably the biggest thing that's just about to happen," Bushnell continued. "In your home. Bringing you a cup of coffee. Getting you a beer."

People are always coming up to Bushnell and asking him what the next big thing is going to be. "Next time you have one of your zillion-dollar ideas, Nolan," they tell him, "just give me a holler and I'll invest some money." No problem, Bushnell says, I've already got it: robots. "Well, hmmm, Nolan," the people invariably say. "Why don't you let me know about your next big idea after that?"

The awful thing about being ahead of your time is that nobody believes you until afterward, and then people figure you were just lucky. In the early Seventies, when Bushnell was trying to interest the business world in video games, which he had just invented, he heard all kinds of dire predictions. Hoodlums would break into the games and "steal the TVs," executives told him. Nobody would be able to figure out the rules. Nobody would want to play. Even later, after success had apparently vindicated him, most manufacturers figured the video boom was a one-shot deal.

Now, of course, all anybody wants to hear about is video games.

" 'Hey, innovate me some more, like you did last year,' " Bushnell mocks. " 'Design me a new game cartridge.' Well, there's no question but that I could build a $100,000,000 company relatively quickly making game cartridges. Yawn. I want to build a billion-dollar company that's going to last forever."

Robots, he believes, will someday be the second major purchase a family makes. You'll buy a house, and then you'll buy a robot. You won't have any choice! You'll be living in the future!

"International robotics travel," Bushnell says, gazing into the mists. "There's a little garage and it's full of robots and it's in London. And you get into a little machine and you put on a headset, and pretty soon you are there. You get to drive the robot around and look at Big Ben and walk down the streets and that sort of thing. For all intents and purposes, according to your senses, you're in London. But you're really in one of my pizza parlors."

Even as we speak, Bushnell is building robots. At a company called Catalyst Technologies in Sunnyvale--in a low, rust-colored building that looks like an enormous car air conditioner--a team of engineers is putting the finishing touches on a rudimentary robot that will be for sale by the time you read this article. The head of Catalyst Technologies is Nolan Bushnell. Catalyst is actually an umbrella organization that encompasses more than a dozen independent corporations working hard to make the future an interesting and, undoubtedly, expensive place to live. The company building the robots is called Androbot. Another company, called Cinemavision, is fiddling with a color-television screen that will give you four times the resolution of your present set. Timbertech is a computer camp that is already making children smarter than you are. Byvideo, under the direction of a former head of Atari's coin-operated-games division, is laboring to make the mail-order catalog obsolete.

The Catalyst idea is simple. Silicon Valley, Bushnell says, is filled with bright young engineers who have good ideas for computer-related products but who know nothing at all about running a business. (continued on page 248)Nolan Bushnell(continued from page 134) When those people--who in simpler days were known as nerds--start their own companies, they often bog down in minor details. Their fundamental inner nerdiness simply overwhelms them.

"For example," says one of Bushnell's associates, "which Xerox-type machine do you buy? Well, a technologist can get fascinated with the intricacies and the engineering that go into the machines and spend three weeks making his decision. It'll be the right decision, but he'll spend too much time making it. Our product at Catalyst is essentially to provide the entrepreneurial team with the key to the door. They walk into their office and, lo and behold, there's a desk and a chair and a telephone system that works; there's a full accounting system, purchasing, receiving; there's a stack of papers on the desk; and when the leader gets through signing his name 35 times, he's incorporated, he's got employee-benefit plans, he's got insurance, he's got the whole works, he's got his patent-secrecy forms-- everything he needs--and he can devote his efforts to the development process as opposed to making mistake after mistake."

Think of Catalyst as a day-care center for the scientifically encumbered. The setup enables Bushnell to keep his fingers in lots of pies, which is the way he likes to operate. For a man who has more ideas than he knows what to do with, it's close to an ideal situation.

One idea that he doesn't quite know what to do with yet (and won't until he can compete with Atari) involves video games that defy the ordinary definition of such games. "Envision actually going against the dragon in Lord of the Rings," he says. "To go in and actually play a real game of Dungeons & Dragons, so that you're there. Or let's say we'll put you in the Middle Ages and teach you history in a more realistic way than any class or sterile, stupid textbook." He says his pizza parlors now contain only about ten percent of all the stuff they eventually will and that there's no limit to what the technology will someday be able to do.

"Someday" may be closer than you think. In January, Bushnell paid $2,200,000 for Videa Incorporated, an "electronic entertainment" company, founded by a former Atari engineer, that had started life as a member of the Catalyst flock. Videa's founders left Atari in 1981 after deciding that the company had become too big and too bureaucratic. They had intended to wean themselves from Catalyst as soon as they were strong enough to make it on their own, but Bushnell was impressed by what they were doing and made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Videa will now be the centerpiece of Sente Technologies, a brand-new company that will compete head to head with Atari and, Bushnell hopes, will inaugurate the second generation of video games. (Atari is a term from the Japanese game go, that means roughly the same thing as check in chess. Sente means checkmate.) Sente games will incorporate holograms and video discs and all sorts of other technology that Videa's executives are still tantalizingly vague about.

"I'm interested in doing for the American kid what the educational system will not do for him," Bushnell says, "and that's prepare him for the next century. I'm really interested in making sure that the fabric of society holds together, and I think you do that by making sure that the kids are properly trained. I think the American school system is the shits. Kids nowadays are being taught to be functionally useless in the 21st Century."

If you're like a lot of people, you probably figure you can get by for another decade or so with just Monday Night Football and reruns of The Love Boat. But the future is going to arrive nonetheless. In the world Bushnell contemplates, kindergartners will learn to type before they can write, pounding away on computers with big, bright keys. Robots will provide companionship and therapy for kids who can't make friends. Passengers on airplanes will amuse themselves by playing video games built into the backs of the seats in front of them.

Bushnell leans back and puffs contentedly on his pipe. "Catalyst is the only instance I know of in which a for-profit organization has become an entrepreneurial incubator," he says. Puff, puff, puff. "A hothouse of new ideas and technologies." Puff, puff. "A warm, cuddly environment for success."

•

Bushnell's father, a struggling cement contractor, died of a heart attack when his son was just 15. Young Nolan suddenly found himself at large in a house full of females, a situation he did not fail to take advantage of. "I was a little bit of a ne'er-do-well," he says. "It's hard to say that I was a compassionate pillar of support to my mother."

His background is very humble. He grew up in Clearfield, Utah, a dreary Mormon outpost near the shores of the Great Salt Lake. Dreaming of a career in science, Bushnell spent much of his youth in the garage, blowing things up. Once, he built a liquid-fuel rocket engine, strapped it to a roller skate and nearly burned the place down. "It scared the shit out of me," he recalls. His mother avoided his bedroom "for fear she'd get electrocuted." Later, in high school, he broadened his horizons. With the help of friends, he attached a 100-watt light to an enormous kite and persuaded a fair percentage of the local population that Utah was under alien attack.

"Pranks were kind of my thing," Bushnell says, "though every now and then, some of them ended up being a little dodgy or on the cusp of legality." One time, he and some friends took a few shotgun shells, removed the shot, put on ski masks, borrowed somebody's car, screeched up to a friend and fired both barrels into his chest. The friend smacked two handfuls of catsup against his shirt and fell to the ground. Bushnell and his buddies tossed him into the trunk and sped away while hosts of astonished Latter-day Saints looked on. "We never did get caught for that," he says with a grin.

In college--first at Utah State and later at the University of Utah--he studied engineering, economics, philosophy, mathematics and business. He supported himself by guessing people's weights and ages at a Salt Lake City amusement park during the summers, and he worked so hard that he was eventually put in charge of the park's entire games department.

During the school year, Bushnell dabbled in Kierkegaard and developed a deep and abiding fascination with computers, which at the time (the middle and late Sixties) were big, hot, slow, expensive and not much more intelligent than the fancy pocket calculators unpopular sixth graders wear on their belts today. University computer jocks in those days spent most of their official time doing things like calculating pi to a billion places; but after hours, they liked to sneak back into the labs and crank up some games. The most popular one was an outer-space shoot-'em-up called Spacewar, which had been invented and refined by pointy heads at MIT and Harvard. Spacewar was positively paleolithic by modern amusement standards, but it was held to be a considerable improvement over actual research. Bushnell became an avid player and realized that if the technology could somehow be scaled down and made affordable, Spacewar would make one hell of a toy.

After his marriage in 1967 and his graduation a year later, he moved to California and went to work for Ampex. Electronics prices, meanwhile, began to tumble, and he spent spare moments tinkering in an impromptu laboratory staked out in his daughter's bedroom. In 1971, he scraped together $500 and founded his own company, Syzygy. At the same time, he signed on as a product engineer with Nutting Associates, a smalltime arcade-game manufacturer that agreed to produce his first video game, a primitive Spacewar knockoff called Computer Space.

"Computer Space was not a commercial hit," Bushnell admits. The game managed to be, all at once, too complicated, too simple and no fun. But the young inventor was not discouraged. He hired an engineer named Al Alcorn and initiated him into the art.

"We were going to build a driving game," Bushnell says, "but I thought it was too big a step for him to go from not knowing what a video game was to that. So I defined the simplest game I could think of, which was a tennis game, and told him how to build it. I thought it was going to be a throwaway, but when he got it up and running, it turned out to be a hell of a lot of fun. We were under contract to Nutting at the time and we said, 'Shee-it, let's see if they'll take this instead.' "

Bushnell named the game Pong. Nutting turned it down and told him to get lost, which he had little trouble doing. (Bill Nutting ended up running an air-taxi service for missionaries in East Africa. So there.) Bushnell tried to interest other game manufacturers in his invention but was turned down everywhere he went. With the sound of slammed doors echoing in his ears, he changed his company's name to Atari and began to produce the game himself.

Pong was such a huge success that Bushnell was unable to keep pace with the demand, and Atari ended up controlling only about ten percent of the market it had created. Even so, the young company finished fiscal 1973 with $3,200,000 in sales and a brand-new outlook on life. Bushnell and his associates began to act like the whippersnappers they were, intimating to their elders that they had things just about figured out. Company meetings came to resemble Saturday night at Animal House, and bushels of Pong money were squandered on unprofitable new ventures. A year after its remarkable debut, Atari was in danger of going broke.

"That was the toughest year," says Joseph Keenan, who later became Atari's president and today is the president of Pizza Time. "Pong was gone. We had other video games, but the industry really hadn't arrived yet. After Pong, the coin-operated business started drifting back to pinballs. The distributors were not convinced that video games were here to stay."

Nor was Bushnell's wife of seven years. Tired of being married to an obsession, she made what in retrospect could be viewed as one of the most ill-considered financial decisions in the history of divorce. "It was one of those things," Bushnell says, "where, implicitly if not explicitly, you end up saying, 'It's me or the business.' And I went with the business." He waited through Christmas for the sake of his two children, then packed his bag and left on New Year's Day 1974.

Less than a year later, Atari hit its stride. The introduction of Gran Trak in late 1974 inaugurated a continuous string of arcade triumphs. The next year, a version of Pong designed to be played on ordinary TVs moved the company into the wide-open home market, with Sears promising to buy every unit the factory could make.

That new success didn't dampen the emerging Atari lifestyle, however. The company's new projects still tended to ride in on tides of beer foam or emerge from clouds of marijuana smoke. Neckties were unheard of and practical jokes were the predominant mode of human interaction. When a team of marketing minions from Sears paid a visit to the company's production facilities, Bushnell made a lasting impression by riding around the factory floor on a conveyor belt, in a box. Elsewhere in the organization, happy employees tried to drive an executive mad by gradually adding lead weights to his telephone receiver.

By 1975, Atari had just about everything it needed except cash. The company's potential market was so vast that it couldn't grow fast enough to keep all its customers adequately amused. Bushnell realized he needed help and began to look for a buyer. In 1976, after Disney and MCA had rejected the opportunity, Warner Communications bought the company for $28,000,000. (The deal nearly fell through when a newspaper ran a picture depicting Bushnell "in a hot tub with a ladyfriend," in the words of Fortune magazine.) Nearly half the purchase price went directly to Bushnell, who stayed on as chairman.

The Warner/Atari deal was an extremely smooth move for all concerned--Bushnell and his associates made a fortune; Atari got the financial and managerial support it required; Warner picked up a desperately needed source of megaprofits--but the marriage was precarious. Bushnell's free-and-easy management style infuriated Warner's staid executives, who soon learned that if you wanted to find him during working hours, Atari was just about the last place you should look. "After we sold the company," Keenan told a reporter later, "we were significantly less motivated to bust our humps." The inevitable showdown came in 1978, when Bushnell blew up at a budget meeting in New York and either quit or was kicked out. He-bought back the rights to his Pizza Time idea, which Warner had never been wild about, and set out on his own.

When Warner executives talk about the history of Atari, they tend to dwell on the irresponsibility of Nolan Bushnell; Bushnell's version stresses corporate stuffiness and lack of creativity. But the fact is that neither party has anything to complain about. Atari would never have become the red-hot company it did without the sober ministrations of Warner's executive team. But it never would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been for the extraordinary energy and drive of Bushnell.

"Even after Warner had been in place for a while," says Gene Lipkin, a former head of Atari's coin-op division, "Nolan was the only one who believed Atari could be a billion-dollar-plus company. And we used to really razz him about it. We'd say, 'Bullshit, Nolan, it's not going to happen.' But it did. He's got that sixth or seventh sense of what might work, and he's really in tune with the consumers of our generation. That's what he does best. He provides that initial concept and spirit to do something, and then he's done with it and he's off to another one, and it's got to be chopped and filled from there."

•

After hanging around with Bushnell for a while, I realized that over the course of my life, I had fooled myself into believing I didn't want to be rich. I came to my senses while cruising down the California coast at Mach 82 in one of his Learjets, a heart-breakingly beautiful aircraft named the Danieli after the hotel in Venice where he and his current wife, who isn't all that much more than half his age, spent their honeymoon.

That Bushnell bothered to stay in a hotel anywhere is worthy of note, considering his habit of buying the places in which he likes to live. In the space of less than a decade, he has managed to turn his Atari windfall into $70,000,000 or so. At last reckoning, he owned a condominium in Aspen, a house in Georgetown, a palace in Paris (in whose back yard the Eiffel Tower literally is) and the old Folger mansion, south of San Francisco. The Paris house cost "a ridiculous sum," Bushnell says. The California house has stables, a pool, tennis courts, manicured grounds, old stone walls. It sits on a 16-acre estate that looks bigger than it is because "it's sort of in the middle of a park, too." The Bushnells enjoy throwing lavish outdoor parties for, a close friend says, "500 close friends."

"I don't have a train," Bushnell told me, in a context I have forgotten, as we streaked across the sky. "And I don't want to get one."

I personally would settle for a Learjet, even if I could have only one of them. The Danieli is upholstered in Italian leather and has, of course, a bar. Gerald Ford has ridden in it and so has Francis Ford Coppola, to name only two passengers with Ford in their names. When Bushnell takes the plane to Paris, he stops in Iceland to refuel and, I assume, go to the bathroom. (The pilots told me there was a toilet on board, but after we landed, I looked for it everywhere I could think of, without success. Not that anybody buys a Learjet to go to the bathroom in it. Maybe this is just another one of those things where, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.)

"Did Indians fish?" Bushnell asked, gazing down through clouds at the gray Pacific.

There was a silence.

"I'm sure they did," said Keenan. "You mean ocean fish, I assume. Maybe with nets, though. Or like the Hawaiians, where you build a wall and capture the fish."

Bushnell started singing softly and doing as much of a Hawaiian fishing dance as his suit, the cramped quarters and the fact that he was sitting down would allow. " 'We are going to a hukilau--huki, huki, huki, hukilau.' "

Keenan is only a year older than Bushnell, but his hair is white, which may indicate what working with the man can do to a person. His official title is president of Pizza Time, but his real function is as Bushnell's no man. Even in the middle of the night, while the rest of Keenan is snoring in his bed, a tiny part of him is wide-awake and saying no to Nolan. ("Sometimes, I don't even say no," he told me. "Sometimes, I just say yes and then don't do anything about it.") When Bushnell looked out the window and said he could see snow on the mountains below, Keenan at first professed not to believe him. That is his usual first reaction to virtually everything Bushnell says and does.

I asked Bushnell if he entertained political ambitions, as so many rich men do.

"Yeah," he said, "I was big on that. I'm not sure that I'll ever run for office. I'd love the challenge of the campaign; you know, strategy and winning--I think I'd be good at that. I'd just hate the job once I got it."

You know, he always hates the job once he gets it. That, in a way, is the secret of his success.

As is probably to be expected of a man with $70,000,000 who once had Jerry Ford as a passenger in his $3,800,000 airplane, Bushnell's politics lie considerably closer to his right wing than to his left. I asked him if there were any politicians he was particularly fond of. He was silent for a long time.

"That's dangerous ground," he said in a low voice, as though I had just told him I knew about the flying saucer in his garage. "I don't like to talk that much about it. There are certain guys that you hate and loathe and yet you will sometimes support them because you are more able to tolerate what you don't like about them than you are the alternative. I haven't found a politician yet that I consider to be a pure play. I like Senator Bill Roth of Delaware. He's a good guy. But there are certain things. . . . I really believe that Government should stay out of business and stay out of the bedroom as well, and stay out of schools. So, though I'm not an anarchist, I'm a hell of a lot closer to being an anarchist than I am to being a socialist. I believe that socialistic governments are very, very inefficient. Can you imagine a whole society being run like the post office?"

We zoomed along. "There's Disneyland," he said, looking down, "with a very marginal crowd." Everyone laughed. Walt Disney is the competition, to some extent, and it was raining on his amusement park. Bushnell turned philosophical as we considered the soggy people milling around the Matterhorn. "I'm amazed at how comfortable foul-weather gear is," he said. "I'm almost getting to the point where I feel like putting it on anyway."

Bushnell owns a restaurant in Sunnyvale called the Lion and Compass. The people at Catalyst refer to it as the Silicon Valley fraternity house, and they spend a lot of time there. Bushnell built it because there just wasn't anyplace in town to get a decent meal, a fact I can attest to. (Good restaurants in Silicon Valley are as rare as bookstores, and vice versa. Your basic computer jock's idea of gourmet cooking is prime rib, medium well.) The Lion and Compass serves very passable food, but when you walk into the place, you get the feeling the staff is expecting you to use the word classy a few times before you leave. There's a stock-market ticker in the bar and there are white Princess phones beside the tables. Everything on the menu is in English except the French fries, which are called pommes frites.

"You should have called the place Bushy's," I told Bushnell.

He considered this. "No," he said, "I don't like to name things after myself. Then I can't sell them. Nice, transferable names--that's what I want. I have a basic theory that you can't bank ego. Therefore, it's something I can't afford."

He glanced at Keenan to see if that statement was going to fly. Keenan, though dozing, raised his eyebrows. "But it's something I have an excess of," Bushnell added quickly.

"Yes," Keenan said, yawning. "I was having a hard time with that one."

"I could see there was a countervailing opinion," Bushnell said. "I think it's OK to have ego, but not when it costs you something. Now, isn't that fair, Joe?"

"Yes, that's much better."

"Do you have any sense of what it is that motivates you?" I asked.

"Yeah," Bushnell said. "I think it's boredom. It's sort of the converse of motivation. I feel like I have to have something interesting to work on. Kierkegaard has a dialectic in which he bases the prime reason for the existence of man on boredom. God was bored and that's why He invented the world, and then man was bored, and so on. Reading that was really when I decided that, at least where I was concerned, boredom was the motivation."

"Of all your projects," I asked, "do you have a favorite?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "It's always the next one."

•

Bushnell's next project for some time to come will probably involve robots, which are just about his favorite things in all the world. When I dropped by the Androbot lab on my last day in Sunnyvale, one of the prototypes was moving sluggishly because Bushnell had spent a couple of hours running down its batteries the night before.

Bushnell gives fits to the guys at Androbot. When he isn't playing with their robots, he's making all sorts of fantastic predictions about what the machines will eventually be able to do. "Nolan doesn't have to deal with the problem I have to deal with," says Tom Frisina, the company's president, an extremely nervous man who says "You bet" too much and doesn't like to talk to reporters. "A lot of people have been wanting a robot for as long as they can remember Your article will create an immediate reaction on the part of those people, and they'll have nothing to satisfy that immediate want."

Do you hear that? If you are the sort of person whose hopes are unrealistically raised by the things you read in magazines, go do something else for a while. I'm going to talk about the robots.

Actually, Frisina is a very nice man. After considerable haggling, he finally agreed to give me and a camera crew from NBC a quick tour of his laboratory. We followed him down a long corridor and then waited in an office while he went off to get something. Soon we heard a whirring noise and turned around just in time to see an honest-to-God three-foot-tall beige robot get stuck in the shag carpeting and make a sound like a car spinning its wheels on a sheet of ice.

"Isn't he adorable?" Frisina asked.

"Is that a boy or a girl?" asked an NBC producer.

Since I was the only person in the room representing an organization that prints pictures of naked people, that question was directed to me. I declined to make a judgment but later on asked Frisina the same thing.

"It's hard to say," he told me. "Hard to say what he is. Probably an A.C./D.C. He goes both ways. By 1990, I'm sure there will probably be a concubine version of some sort."

We moved out into the lab itself. The robot strolled up and down the hall and turned around in circles for a while, and the technicians plugged away on their computers and said things like "I'll go get some schematics" and "Where's my graham crackers?" There is a courtyard at Catalyst that contains several chickens and two floppy-eared rabbits, and when I suggested that we take the robot out there for a while, Frisina said, "Oh, we have him out there with the rabbits all the time." The robot didn't disintegrate anything or warn us of any impending dangers. As Frisina repeatedly stressed, the little guy is a moron.

But his successors will be plenty smart. The second model, which may also be for sale (at about $2500) by the time you read this, will be "artificially intelligent," Frisina says. He'll have three microprocessors and he'll be able to decide both where he wants to go and how to get there without breaking anything. His nine or ten infrared and sonar sensors will enable him to seek out human beings. When I paid my visit, Androbot staffers were driving themselves crazy trying to create the necessary technology, essentially from scratch.

And that, really, is the effect that Nolan Bushnell has on the people who work for him. He motivates them with the sheer power of his enthusiasm, and he gets them to produce things they never dreamed they could produce. He is so sure of himself that his confidence energizes everybody who works for him, even when he isn't around.

"Nolan runs through and throws holy water on a few things," says one of his business partners, "and then he's gone and you don't hear from him for a week or so." He may be off in his Learjet somewhere or down in Los Angeles having lunch with someone who doesn't realize yet that Bushnell is about to make him rich. But all the while, his elves back in Sunnyvale are working overtime in their laboratories translating his flights of imagination into things that you and I, as like as not, will buy.

And that is why, when he tells you that someday you're going to own one of his robots, it wouldn't do you any harm to start figuring out where in the hell you are going to put it.

"You may remember him as the man who turned $500 into a company called Atari."

"Kids nowadays are being taught to be functionally useless in the 21st Century."