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We didn't do a square ball and pong because we thought it was cool. We did it because that was all

we could do.

This was Nolan Bushnell, one of the most important figures in the history of the video game industry.

Born in Utah and raised in the LDS church, Bushnell worked at theme parks as a student

and found himself drifting away from his faith as he focused on his career in innovating

electronic amusements.

The first and most notable was his founding of Atari in 1972,

whose revolutionary monochrome table tennis simulation, Pong,

would help birth both the coin-operated arcade cabinet industry and the home console industry.

But Bushnell's actual passion, which had given him dreams of working as a Disney Imagineer,

was animatronics.

And so in 1977, Bushnell parlayed his Atari Clout and Warchest into a new enterprise,

Pizza Time Theater, though the pizza was actually an afterthought, behind the animatronic

stage show featuring an anthropomorphic animal band fronted by its rodent mascot.

Bushnell's background and video arcades also led to expansive kid-friendly amusement areas with games that dispensed redeemable tickets.

After merging with competitors showbiz pizza in the 80s, the brand achieved hegemony in its unique niche. But the rise of adult-oriented

concepts like Dave and Busters led to a decline in the 2000s. The chain then resurged in relevance

in the 2010s due to another video game designer with a religious background, Scott Cawthon, whose

2014 indie mega hit Five Nights at Freddy's would spawn countless follow-up games, a Blumhouse-produced

...