I founded Atari in my garage in Santa Clara while at Stanford. When I was in school, I took a lot of business classes. I was really fascinated by economics. You end up having to be a marketeer, finance maven and a little bit of a technologist in order to get a business going.
The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren't always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I've come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as 'lame.'
The game business reinvents itself every five years.
Do I really want to do a mobile game that's one of 300,000, where discoverability is everything? You really have to have a little more sizzle on the steak. I would rather be one of 100 apps for Google Glass than one of 300,000 for iOS and Android.
The truly creative people tend to be outliers.
We're moving away from a credentialed society to a merit society.
I've always been a tech-head.
Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese's were from high school dropouts, college dropouts. One guy had been in jail.
I had an awful lot of my soul invested in Atari culture.
I want to fix education in the world. As soon as I work on that, I am going to work on world hunger and then world peace.
All schools will end up using game metrics in the future.
I'm the only one who was predicting the Nintendo Wii would beat Sony's PlayStation 3.
Walk to work, even if it's four miles. Ride a bike to work. Drive a different way. On your way there, try to find beauty. You'd be surprised how much more of the neighborhood you can perceive and experience when you're looking for unique spots of beauty.
Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, 'Oh, no; that'll never work. It's too different.'
I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.
I've been in navigation systems, robotics, restaurants, communications systems, touch screens, and now I'm back in games. I like to say I have five-year A.D.D.
The thing we don't want to do is overstate the benefits, but there is all kinds of proof that exercise, both physical and mental, increases brain activity.
In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.
A good interviewer is able to ferret out what the applicant is really passionate about. Ask them what they do for fun, what they're reading, try and find out if they have a life outside of work.
I hate 'Mafia Wars'.
