nolan-bushnell posts

He founded the first version of Atari in 1972. Now Nolan Bushnell is joining the board of directors for the current incarnation of the company that helped to launch the PC and video game industry. Bushnell left Atari in 1978 after selling the company to Warner Communications for $28 million.

Bushnell went on to found or advise a number of companies and start-ups in the last few decades while the Atari name and brand has been owned by a variety of companies over the years. The current incarnation of Atari was bought by the France-based Infogrames who officially changed their name to Atari in 2008.

While some games have attempted to merge the first person shooter genre with elements from RTS games (The Savage series, Command and Conquer: Renegade) none have been deemed a complete success. Today publisher Reality Gap officially launched Battleswarm: Field of Honor, a sci-fi themed free-to-play online game that was originally developed by Asian developer Gameworld Tech. The game itself has one side (the human solider) in a first person view point. They go up against the other (side the bug-like aliens) who have an RTS game play design.

On the occasion of today's official launch of Battleswarm, Big Download got a chance to ask some questions to Reality Gap's Chief Operating Office Mark Hood as he talks about the game, how Pong creator Nolan Bushnell is involved and more.

A few days ago USA Today had the scoop on Battleswarm: Field of Honor, a new sci-fi RTS-FPS hybrid game that's being designed by Pong creator and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell. Today the company behind the game, Gameworld Tech, announced that the beta for Battleswarm has launched on their official web site.

The press announcement also comes with the first 'real' screenshots from the game (USA Today had a really tiny image in their first article). As you can see the game pits human soldiers against insect-like alien threats (a la Starship Troopers). Players who take on humans play in first or third person mode while players who take on the aliens control hundreds of alien units in a RTS mode. The game is free to play now but will officially launch in September with a micro-transaction business model.

Atari founder and Pong creator Nolan Bushnell has stayed busy over the years in the game industry and recently became one of the co-founders of Reality Gap, a microtransation-based game company that recently launched the open beta for a new casual fantasy MMO called Monato Esprit. Now Bushnell is getting his hands dirty on a more hardcore free-to-play game.

USA Today's game blog has the first word on that project, a sci-fi RTS-FPS hybrid called Battleswarm: Field of Honor. The article chats with Bushnell about the project which also has a tiny screenshot of the game itself (that's it above this post). Bushnell said he came up with the game as a way to play online with his five sons; all of whom are first person shooter fans. However he admits that his reaction time in playing FPS is not up to his sons so Battleswarm adds some RTS elements into the mix.

Bushnell, who describes the game as ""a mash-up between StarCraft and Starship Troopers" says microtransactions will be used to purchase upgrades with Bushnell saying, "There are a lot of things you can do for a nickel, dime or quarter." There's no word on when Battleswarm will officially launch.

[Via Blue's News]

The original founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell, is putting his name behind a new play-to-prize online gaming service called GameWager. Yep, we know...we have seen similar businesses crash and burn over the years but this effort is different in that you are playing to win prizes rather than real money.

The site currently support a number of games like Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty 4 and others with support for games like World of Warcraft reportedly coming soon. Sign-up for the program is free and then players compete in GameWager-supported titles only. Players wager and earn virtual tokens for things like in-game kills and accomplishing objectives. Those tokens can later be turned in to win prizes like laptops, graphics cards and other items. It's not currently clear what role Bushnell has in this new business nor where the service gets its revenue from.

Remember when we reported a couple of days ago that Atari founder Nolan Bushnell had spoken about a "stealth" motherboard chip that he claimed would "absolutely stop piracy of gameplay?" Yeah . . . about that. Our sister tech site Engadget has called Bushnell on those comments, stating basically that he didn't know what he was talking about.

Engadget states that the so called "stealth encryption chip", otherwise known as the Trusted Platform Module (or TPM), is anything but a secret. In fact the chip has been placed on board PC motherboards for years. There's also no evidence to indicate that the TPM has curtailed PC game piracy of any kind. One wonders why Bushnell didn't know about this beforehand . . .

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was confident of video game piracy's demise when speaking at a conference hosted Wedbush Morgan Securities this past week. He believes that the Trusted Platform Module (or TPM) -- a secure cryptoprocessor attached to some PC motherboards -- will prove an insurmountable obstacle for would-be software pirates. "The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay," he said. A version of the technology is already shipping in some systems.

The TPM performs a hardware check of installed software, and verifies the software using practically uncrackable encryption keys. Given that console gaming pirates are able to (and must) solder a special chip to their console-of-choice's motherboard to play pirated games, we wonder if it might be possible to perform similar hardware operations on a PC to remove, modify, or replace the TPM chip. Even in the event that it is, the TPM's existence still might raise the bar of technical prowess required to pirate software much higher than most users can reach.

Given that Bushnell was speaking to sell the industry to potential investors, we're understandably skeptical, but his was an intriguing proposition. Bushnell noted, however, that the TPM technology will not solve the characteristically different problems of video and music piracy.