Bitter Bushnell

Atari was a video game console created 25 years ago. The founder Nolan Bushnell apparently thought that those games were never going to be updated. Bushnell, who is now 64 is not fond of the new style of video games. "Video games today are a race to the bottom. They are pure, unadulterated trash and I'm sad for that," Bushnell told the tech magazine Electronic Design in an interview.

Ouch. That's a downer for new video games. Bushnell is revolutionary in the fact that he created the original Atari, which was a pioneer in arcade games, but c'mon stop living in the past. It sounds like to me he thinks that Atari would last forever and there would be no other life form of video games again.

So what is he doing an interview in a magazine for? He has a new system in restaurants, a touch screen at tables in which you can play casual games with the family, called uWink. As of right now there is only one restaurant that has uWink, in Los Angelas...once again ouch. "A lot of video games today are very isolated. You don't see mom and dad, sister and brother, sitting down like they used to play, say, Monopoly. That represented good mentoring time for families that just isn't happening now," said Bushnell.

I do agree with Bushnell that families don't play as many "family" games anymore, and their kids are shooting aliens and bad guys in the other room, but that is the age of video games today. We don't live in the 70's anymore, and there are educational games today, most likely not the shoot 'em up games, but it is a form of entertainment, just like movies are different today than they were 90 years ago. Let's face it, as time passes, so will our form of entertainment.