(FORTUNE Magazine) – Nolan Bushnell loves games. You can see that's true from his office, where his desk is cluttered with dice, playing cards, and dominoes. You can see it on his bookshelves, where titles like The Book of Games and The Domino Book share space with boxes of Scan, Quarto, and Perquackey. And you can see it perhaps most prominently on his resume, whose most notable entries include the founding of Atari, the company that gave birth to the videogame market; the launching of Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater, the kid-friendly restaurant chain that produced a new type of venue for arcade games; and the creation of his current venture, uWink, a networked series of videogames connected to the Internet.

Bushnell refers to games as "legal addictions" and says that is what makes them such good businesses. "It's the natural human impulse to master a set of rules," he explains. "It's this mastery-reward structure that becomes very, very addictive." As it happens, the same might be said of the game of business itself, at least as it applies to Bushnell. Like the arcade junkie who can't go home without putting one more quarter in the slot, Bushnell is a habitual entrepreneur, with more than 20 startups to his credit over the past three decades. But playing the marketplace is trickier than playing, say, Space Invaders. And the thing about games, of course, is that there's always a winner and a loser, and sometimes it's hard to know which column to put Bushnell in.

While Bushnell is justly revered in video-geek circles, and his early successes were impressive in both vision and scope (the unlikely juxtaposition of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese made him the first and probably the last person to win major honors from both the Computer Museum of America and Restaurant News magazine), coming up with an encore has proved trickier. Several of his subsequent endeavors have gone nowhere, and even the successful ones haven't approached the cultural or financial impact of his early ventures.

Moreover, for a guy who helped anticipate and create the "entertainment economy," Bushnell has had a difficult time seeing his concepts through to their full potential. The best examples of that can be found in the early 1980s, when the videogame market crashed. Bushnell was no longer with Atari at that point, having sold the company to Warner Communications (now part of AOL Time Warner, parent of FORTUNE's publisher) and then getting ousted after repeated squabbling with Warner management. Although he didn't go down with that particular ship, he still feels he's been unfairly saddled with the baggage of the brand's eventual collapse.

But during that period Bushnell was still running Chuck E. Cheese, which was forced into bankruptcy by, among other things, the arcade downturn. Fast-forward to 1986: Nintendo rejuvenates the videogame industry, leading a surge that continues today with Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox. It was around the same time that Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe took the theme-restaurant concept--of which Chuck E. Cheese was an early practitioner--and went global, tailoring the concept for adults. (As for old Chuckie, it still flourishes. CEC Entertainment of Irving, Texas, which owns about 350 of Chuck E. Cheese's 405 units, reported revenues of more than $560 million in 2001.)

Why does this prototypical self-starter have trouble finishing the job? The most obvious place to look would be Bushnell's management style. To his credit, he's never had trouble surrounding himself with talented people. Indeed, his staff at Atari included two young Steves named Jobs and Wozniak (whose subsequent metamorphosis into business rock stars only throws Bushnell's failure to do that into higher relief).

And unlike so many control-freak entrepreneurs who insist on micromanaging every last detail of their business, Bushnell prides himself on being an effective delegator. In fact, he says, "Atari grew very, very well because as we'd get one market segment working like a Swiss watch, I'd delegate it off and focus my energies on the next thing."

If anything, Bushnell may be guilty of having delegated too much--he concedes that he didn't keep close enough tabs on Chuck E. Cheese, mainly because he had no interest in being a restaurateur. "I may be the best there is at taking a company from zero to a few hundred million dollars, but after that there are skill sets I don't have the patience for," he admits. Even his wife, Nancy Nini, jokes that he has a "five-year attention span" on new projects.

As Steve Kent, author of The Ultimate History of Video Games (Prima Publishing, 2001), puts it, "Bushnell has charisma and he's brilliant, but he can't follow through. He can recognize how to get people to drop quarters into his game, but that's about it." So as he embarks on yet another venture, the question can't be avoided: With uWink, is he still trying to overcome all his well-documented limitations--or is he finally surrendering to them?

Frankly, it is hard to tell--at least on this Wednesday afternoon. Nolan Bushnell is sitting in his uWink office with a stack of business cards. He takes the first one from the pile, exhales a deep sigh, and begins dialing. "Hello, Jack," he says to a voice-mail system, doing his best to sound enthusiastic. "Nolan Bushnell from uWink here--we met at the conference, remember? I'm calling, basically, to see if you have any interest in funding my company. I'd love to talk with you, so give me a call back at..." Bushnell repeats this routine as he works his way through the pile of cards, his voice utterly lacking the bounce it has when he's discussing games or technology. "Dialing for dollars," he mutters. "This is the part of the job I loathe. Which is why I'm not very good at it.... I'm happy dealing with products and marketing plans and things like that," he says, "but there's a point when a company needs to be public, where your job transitions to one of spending your time with attorneys and accountants and finance people."

And that, clearly, does not set Bushnell's heart pumping. "It excited me the first time and the second time," he says, "but not anymore. Businesses are different, technology is different, markets are different--that's stimulating, that's fun. But the finance community and the laws and the SEC--that's pretty much the same no matter what the damn company is." In other words, when Bushnell gets bored with a given game, he'd just as soon find himself a new slot to put his quarter in. And let's face it, if you'd had as much early success as Nolan Bushnell did, you might find yourself getting bored later on too.

Bushnell became fascinated with videogames while getting his engineering degree at the University of Utah, where he spent late nights playing games on one of the school's computers--one of only four computers in the world at that time that were connected to videoscreens. Then, in 1972, he used $250 in startup capital to found Atari. Soon after, he designed Pong, the simple yet addictive coin-operated videogame that gave birth to an industry and put pinball machines on "tilt."

Within a few years he had expanded Atari from the coin-op realm to the now well-known home video consoles. And in 1976 he sold the company to Warner for $28 million. Soon after that came Chuck E. Cheese, which had been in the embryonic stages as a division of Atari and was purchased back by Bushnell when Warner wasn't interested in developing it. Initially ridiculed by skeptics, it turned out to be a rousing success. So while most people wait a lifetime for that million-dollar idea, Bushnell had two of them before his 35th birthday. That kind of success sets the bar pretty high for future endeavors, especially when the financial payoff is matched by cultural impact. Bushnell has said he was fully aware of how revolutionary his early videogames would be while he was designing them, which, as he now acknowledges, makes it "hard to settle for less." He says the only other time he's really felt that tingle of reshaping the world was with Androbot, an early-1980s venture he describes as "my greatest joy and my greatest sorrow."

Androbot's signature product was a mobile robot companion, which Bushnell fully believed would be ubiquitous in American homes by now. To hear him tell it, the venture was derailed by a technical glitch: The bots developed a static charge as they moved across a rug, which wreaked havoc with their internal computer systems--a problem Bushnell still believes he was only $5 million away from solving. An Androbot prototype sits in his office today, offering mute testimony to dreams unfulfilled. When Bushnell discusses the project, the passion in his voice--the sense of a fantasy that didn't quite come to fruition but still tantalizes him years later--is unmistakable.

Clearly, while he may not be able to focus on any single endeavor for long, Bushnell has never lost sight of his primary goal: to have another huge hit. And heaven knows, he's tried (see chart). A small sampling of his less famous ventures includes Etak, a geographical database that anticipated global positioning system technology and is the basis for much of what you see at maps.com; Compower, which developed the underpinnings for the switching power supply found in PCs; Axlon, a toy company he sold to Hasbro; and Magnum Microwave, which was instrumental in the development of satellite television. "Bushnell's brilliance lies in his capacity to turn abstract ideas into lucrative businesses," says David E. Brown, who profiled Bushnell in his book Inventing Modern America (MIT Press, 2002). "But his ambition to pursue more than one idea is also his curse, distracting him from long-term business building."

Bushnell freely admits that uWink, which he founded in 1999 in Los Angeles, doesn't give him the adrenaline rush he craves. But that's not to say that the company isn't innovative: uWink's touch-screen game consoles, located primarily in bars and airports, are connected to the Internet, so new game software can be downloaded from the company's servers.

Bushnell envisions a virtual private network of uWink addicts eventually being able to play against each other from hundreds of thousands of remote terminals. Although uWink is currently a $15 million company, Bushnell, ever the optimist, sees it grossing over $1 billion within five years. He is clearly proud of uWink, but the tingle factor is lacking, in part because uWink is primarily just a new delivery system for an existing technology. "It's like being the guy who invented cable television instead of the guy who invented the television," he says. "Inventing cable may actually have better economic underpinnings, but it's just not the same. It's the difference between being a telephone company and being Alexander Graham Bell."

Bushnell will be 60 years old next year--old enough to realize that he won't have many more chances to rewrite his legacy. What he really hopes is that uWink's technology will actually have applications in education and "save the American school system." Indeed, as passionate as Bushnell is about games and technology, the quickest way to get him excited is to ask him what he thinks of the country's school system, which he considers tragically, even scandalously, dysfunctional.

With eight children of his own, he's had ample opportunity to see how schools interact with kids, and he thinks he can revolutionize that interaction. "Schools are losing the battle of the mind through bad production values," he says. "A teacher with a piece of chalk can't compete with 30-second commercials that have 243 cuts." Okay, but don't schools have computers? "A school computer is in a highly hostile environment," explains Bushnell. "If a kid can shut down the network by putting a pin through the Ethernet wire, he'll do it--not because he's a bad kid, but because he's 14 and he thinks it's funny." The answer? "A robust, remotely administered system of computers"--in short, uWink, only with educational programming instead of games.

It's hard to say whether Bushnell needs to believe this just to keep moving--in other words, if he's just kidding himself--or if his concept of a "uWinkified" education system will turn out to be the idea he finally takes all the way. If nothing else, he realizes that simply envisioning his dream won't make it happen. That's why, after a career of unsatisfying loose ends, Bushnell is looking at his most important game yet. Anybody got a quarter?

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