Atari Founder Talks Augmented Reality, Pong Copies

Speaking to Eurogamer, Nolan Bushnell, who is the founder of Atari, said that, “The best game that I ever played at Atari was the game of putting my competitors out of business. I really turned out to be pretty good at that.”

He added, “You know, Atari didn’t ship the most Pong games. We were heavily copied. The good news was that anybody with a garage shop could make a Pong game – because that’s all I had. But later on everybody thought: we’ll just copy Atari stuff because they can’t build very fast.”

Bushnell is not interested in being part of the game industry again but if he did return he says his interest would be linked to Augmented Reality and the ways it can be integrated with mobile devices to deliver new game experiences.

The Atari founder is also interested in arcade games, especially if they are designed using the latest technology.