What's Nolan Bushnell doing?

[CJ]

Is he still just running uWink? I thought I remember him saying something along the lines if uWink was a sucess he would explore other areas of gaming. Has he been doing anything else lately? Anyone know?

[V.R]

I wouldn't know! Haven't done any research on the man for a while. If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say that uwink would have been a failure, hardly anyones knows about it.

I reckon hes up to something! Then again, he's getting on, apparently he doesn't even play video games much anymore!

[mos6507]

uWink's office is only about 10 minutes away from me and it looks like it's still active.

 

It does look like they are retooling, by the looks of their new website.

 

I've thought about dropping by to say hi, but I've never felt it would be appropriate to do so. In the grand scheme of things I'm not much of an acquaintance of his even though I interviewed him and was involved in the Nolangate situation.

 

The technology sector has been hurt terribly with the dot com bust, so uWink has a lot to overcome. However, it also doesn't have a lot of overhead either. So maybe they are managing to scrape by without getting buried in debt.

 

My problem with uWink's operations is that their game systems are built around a touch-screen monitor.

 

This severely limits the genre of game you can make.

 

There really is no way to make a twitch style classic game with a touch screen. Maybe LRTF games like Asteroids would work but only if the touch screen could detect multiple keypresses at once.

 

If you look at uWink's offerings they are all pretty much turn-based: card, puzzle, and trivia. Even the ones they label as action games fall under these categories. This is the kind of stuff you see for free in java applets or flash games on the web. I think it's a hard sell to get the customer to value these types of games enough to get them to pay much money to play them.

 

Nevertheless, it looks like uWink wants to use the touchscreen as THE distinguishing characteristic of their systems.

 

The control scheme of cocktail machines where a small joystick and buttons are in a nook behind clear glass works quite well, so I don't think having a touchscreen-only interface is a necessity to use it in a table-top environment.

[ATARI TROLL]

I received an autograph pic from him about two years ago! Didn't get the low down though! You know he has to be playing pong in his basement from time to time!

[raindog]

These days whenever I think to myself "whatever happened to so and so" I put the name into news.google.com, which only goes back a month or so but indexes like every news outlet you can hit with a URL without paying.

 

Nolan's out there 40 times, but mostly in historical context for the Infogrames/Atari thing. The most recent mention (again in a historical context) was in http://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/Si...der_030529.html , where he's used as an example of the pioneers of the previous wave of technological decentralization (with wireless and Linux clusters supposedly the current wave.)

 

uWink, on the other hand, gets no mentions at all in the last month. If they're in any position to, now would be the time to capitalize on Nolan's name being a little less deep in people's subconscious than usual by issuing some kind of PR.

[D.Yancey]

The touch screen games are extremely popular in Sports Bars and in truck stops. The novelty does seem to have worn off though. Poeple tend to play poker and cherry machines much more. Sometimes I'll see or hear about an arcade on the CB radio. I get excited to visit it and then there's nothing but cherry machines and stupid quarter pushers! And they've got the nerve to call it an ARCADE.