A major video game industry event has cancelled its decision to honour Atari founder Nolan Bushnell after attention was drawn to well-documented examples of a sexist culture at the company he oversaw in the 1970s.
Bushnell was due to receive the Pioneer award at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March, recognising his 40 years of involvement in the industry. Together with Ted Dabney, he set up Atari in 1972, developing the seminal arcade machine Pong, before manufacturing the Atari 2600, one of the first home video game consoles.
However, after the decision to award Bushnell was announced on Tuesday, the news provoked an outcry on social media, as games industry members pointed to examples of Atari’s sexist culture.
In the book The Ultimate History of Video Games by Steve Kent, Atari employee Al Acorn remembered Bushnell holding company meetings in a hot tub and attempting to coax a female employee to join him. Acorn recalled: “Nolan needed some papers and documents so he called his office and said, ‘Have Miss So and So bring them up.’ We were in this tub [when she arrived] so he proceeded to try to get her in the tub during the board meeting.”
In a 2012 Playboy profile of Atari, Bushnell stated that prototype machines were named after attractive female employees, with the home version of Pong codenamed Darlene after an employee who “was stacked and had the tiniest waist”.
When author Tristan Donovan spoke to ex-Atari executive Ray Kassar for his video game history book, Replay, Kassar is quoted as stating, “When I arrived [at Atari] on the first day, I was dressed in a business suit and a tie and I met Nolan Bushnell. He had a T-shirt on. The T-shirt said: ‘I love to fucck.’ That was my introduction to Atari.”
After the awards announcement on Tuesday, games industry employees began to vent their anger at the decision in the wake of the #MeToo and Time’s Up campaigns.
Game designer Elizabeth Sampat wrote: “This is not the year to fete a man who pressured female employees into topless hot tub parties and code-named Pong after the hottest woman in the office.”
Others followed, using the hashtag #notnolan, with Gillian Smith, a computer science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute tweeting: “While other industries are distancing themselves from the abusive and sexist behaviors of powerful men, GDC is giving a pioneer award to one of them.”