Leonardo DiCaprio Set to Bring Us Biopic On Life Of Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell

Nolan-1It looks like Leonardo DiCaprio will be starring in a biopic about Atari founder Nolan Bushnell! We get the following scoop from the legendary caves of Yahoo:

The actor will star in and produce “Atari,” a project about the godfather of the video game industry, Nolan Bushnell. The engineering student, puzzle-lover and game enthusiast went from fixing broken pinball machines to launching Atari Corp., a video game manufacturer, in the early ’70s. Its first product was a little game called Pong that transfixed kids in suburban rec rooms across the country and led to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of video game sales.

Within a few years, he sold the company to Warner Communications for $28 million. During the next three decades, Bushnell started many other tech ventures and also created Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theaters.

There are a lot of bioipcs coming down the pipe, but this one stands out, and has certainly caught my attention. I remember being 5 and getting my first Atari 2600. My brother and I were blown away by the system and many hours were played on that machine. I remember sucking at a game called River Raid. My father and brother were awesome at it…. but I was unable to master the river. In any event, the Atari was my gateway into the world of video games, and I am forever in the debt of Nolan Bushnell.

I had no idea that Nolan went on to make other businesses including Chuck E. Cheese’s. This guy is a visionary that leaves fun in his wake.

DiCaprio seems to have a skill for biopics and I welcome him in this role. I am pumped to see this film and am interested in the story of the man who made video games a household phenomena.

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4 thoughts on “Leonardo DiCaprio Set to Bring Us Biopic On Life Of Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell

  1. Nolan Bushnell created the system used in arcades, not in the home. The creator of the home video game – that which uses a standard television – is Ralph Baer, not Bushnell. Baer created the “brown box” and licensed it to Magnavox in 1967. He later exhibited it as the Odyssey system in 1972. Bushnell was the first to license that patent after attending the exhibition.

  2. Are people really clamoring for a biopic of a man who is largely anonymous? You may love his product and the industry it spawned, but there’s a huge difference between the larger than life eccentric exploits of someone like Howard Hughes and a person almost none of us have heard of until this news hit.

    Having said that I think the right writer and director can make almost anything riveting and DiCaprio has had a pretty good instinct lately for quality projects. Maybe there’s something there.

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