The latest person to be affected by the #MeToo movement is game and tech industry pioneer Nolan Bushnell, who was scheduled to receive an award from the Game Developers Conference but is instead apologizing for his past behavior.
The GDC said Wednesday that it would not be giving the Pioneer Award to Bushnell — co-founder of Atari and more — after feedback from the gaming community.
The committee that votes on the conference’s awards believes “their picks should reflect the values of today’s game industry,” the GDC said on Twitter.
— GDC (@Official_GDC) January 31, 2018
Bushnell is legendary in Silicon Valley and beyond not only for his co-founding of Atari and starting Chuck E. Cheese, but also for hiring Steve Jobs at Atari. Oh, and he has been described as brash, and was known for hosting naked hot-tub parties where business was conducted.
“Sexual harassment, or things like that, wasn’t an issue,” Bushnell once said when describing Atari’s work culture during the 1970s, Silicon Valley historian Leslie Berlin wrote in her recently released book “Troublemakers.” Bushnell — who also had a beer tap in his office — would later be replaced as CEO of the video game company he co-founded.
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Atari engineers also reportedly codenamed their games after female co-workers. The famous Atari game Pong, for example, was codenamed Darlene, after an employee whose physical attributes Bushnell praised in a 2012 Playboy interview.
Read the full story at SiliconBeat.
