We'll talk during the paid portion of this podcast where I advertise my game. Welcome to Season 5, Episode 5 of Acquired,

the podcast about great technology companies

and the stories behind them.

I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs,

a startup studio and early stage venture fund in Seattle.

And I'm David Rosenthal, and I'm a general partner at Wave Capital,

an early stage venture firm focused on marketplaces based in San Francisco.

And we are your hosts.

Today we are talking about the company that invented the home video game industry,

Atari.

And we have someone with us who's got some pretty good stories about it. The founder of

Atari, the father of the video game industry, Nolan Bushnell. Hello Nolan.

Great to be here. Good fun.

Indeed, thank you so much for joining us.

As some of our listeners know, Nolan has started a swath of other businesses, one of which, awesomely, is Chuck E.

Cheese, which we will get much, much deeper into later this episode.

We dug up some photos of Young Ben last night.

Yeah, Nolan, I should let you know, I'm going to turn my computer around right now.

Chuck E. Cheese was, like far and away my favorite place in the world growing up and

he was designed that way you know. Here's some pictures of my third birthday at

Chuck E Cheese and there's me with my favorite toy, which is a Chuck E. How fun.

Now, Nolan, this is fun timing for us and for our listeners since our last episode covered the early days of Sequoia

...