Where Are They Now? - Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell

After Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, the once largest and seemingly unstoppable game and console developer, sold his company to Time Warner in 1977 for $28 million, he made several attempts to re-enter the game industry.

On October 1^st, 1983, the date his non-competition clause ended with Time Warner after he sold Atari, he announced Sente Games, which a console/arcade developer with Midway as the distributor. After a decent run, and with only one majot hit Hat Trick, Sente games was absorbed into Midway in 1987.

Determined as ever, Bushnell created Axlon in 1988 under his Catalyst Technologies Venture Capitol Group. Axlon developed some of the finest games for the Atari 2600 very late in its life cycle, including Off the Wall and Secret Quest, the last game officially released for the 2600 in the US (1989).

Despite the brilliance of Axlon's games, they were published only to help generate enough revenue to keep the company alive for their real mission - to launch a new revolutionary game console to rival the Nintendo dominated market.

To create this console, Axlon partnered Hasbro. Bushnell, and his partner Tom Zito created the NEMO project, which was the code word for the project used internally at Hasbro, which purportedly meant, "Never Ever Mention Outside."

The console later came to be known as Control-Vision. It was to use VHS as its storage medium, like the View-Master InteractiveVision, only with a focus on using real live actors for games, and it used a special patented technology called "InstaSwitch." A game called Scene of the Crime AKA Night Trap, now famous for being the subject of hearings in the US Congress in the 1990's due to girls in wearing the kind of lingerie than can be seen in a beer commercial in prime time, was developed as a tech-demo to showcase the amazing InstaSwitch technology, which allowed the seamless transition from one part of a VHS tape to another. Sewer Shark, a game of Sega CD infamy, was also originally developed for this system.