Alt MBA: Atari Edition

2025-09-24

Nolan Bushnell on Atari, 50 Years Later:

HTG: So let’s go the opposite way now. What did you do “wrong” at Atari that people could learn from today?

Bushnell: I think that I—how do I put this without sounding like an asshole? I put up with incompetence more than I should have. I should have been quicker to fire.

HTG: Well, you weren’t born a manager, right? You’d been mostly an engineer…

Bushnell: Well, that’s actually not quite true. Remember I managed 150 kids at the amusement park. That was kind of my MBA, I’ve always felt. It was a summer job, and it wasn’t like managing a bunch of engineers, but keeping everybody happy and working was important. So was managing the numbers—labor percentages and things like that.