Why I Turned Down Steve Jobs

Would you turn down Steve Jobs? This man did.

Calling the shots: Modern-day Jobs rarely gets owned.

By Kikizo Staff

Would you turn down Steve Jobs? This man did!

It's remarkable to think the video games business can all be traced back to the efforts of one man. But it can, and that man is Nolan Bushnell - founder of Atari, creator of Pong and pretty much the father of video games.

And in a new interview published on Kikizo today, Bushnell explains why he did something many struggling businesses would think ludicrous today: show Apple founder Steve Jobs the door.

He told us: "You've got to understand that Atari was very underfunded all the way along - the venture-capital community and financial community didn't get the fact that games were a business.

"We were using every bit of capital that we had just to keep up with the growth... to take on anything else that would alienate any of that capital just didn't make sense at the time. I recognised that we were going to be able to - at some point in time - get into the computer business."

Ultimately that's what Atari did, when Busnhell sold the business to corporate giant Warner, finally gaining access to decent funds.

Talking about both Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Busnhell said they were "young and excited... but I was not convinced that they were ready for the bruising business world.

"I introduced them to Don Valentine, who brought in Mike Markala, who provided the business skills for their first years in business. I think much of their early success was because of Mike. Jobs has grown into a truly great CEO -- if it would have happened anyway is anyone's guess."

Early days: Pong was the first videogame to take the world by storm

Bushnell told us that selling Atari so early was his biggest regret - and it's no secret things didn't work out with Warner, either.

He explained: "I really had massive, massive disagreements with how Warner was running the company. I really saw that they were going to totally screw it up. The only thing that I was wrong about is that it took them two years longer than I thought it would."

"I probably should have gotten back heavily into the games business in the late Eighties... I feel I had some core skill-sets in the games business that I sort of allowed to lie fallow."

Elsewhere in the four-page interview, Bushnell says he's "a big believer in the Wii" and discusses the past, present and future of the video games industry. Check out the full interview here.