Thursday, June 12, 2008

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has told GameDaily BIZ that he believes he can actually serve 600 trillion games through his uWink business

>>uWink offers a variety of those same social experiences that Bushnell sees as essential to a game experience. And there's other news, such as new locations in Mountain View, California, and in Los Angeles at Hollywood and Highland.

"Probably the most important [aspect] is that we have decided to sell our software to anybody," announces Bushnell. "When you look at numbers..." He asks for a pen. "Right now, we serve about six million games per restaurant." McDonalds famously measured their numbers of burgers sold, but Bushnell measures the games.

"We're going to be selling our software, and right now we've got some inquiries on the part of some really interesting people." Those people find the menu ordering system to be an efficient, labor saving device.

"We've got this thing where I get to serve the games," he says, and they don't care about the games, "and I get a little piece of the revenue."

"I believe that, by 2020, that I can...be in 100,000 restaurants," estimates Bushnell. So at six million per year, he continues, figuring on the napkin, "Zero, zero, zero." He pauses, adding. "Zero, zero."

"Six hundred..." Bushnell says, pausing once more to count just how large this number is. His publicist helpfully guesses how the sentence ends, "Million games?"

But the man responsible for the business of interactive entertainment looks up from his napkin. "Six hundred trillion," he says calmly. And as the number sinks in, "That's a lot," he says. "Now what's wrong with that? A 100,000 restaurants?"

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