Next Generation has a good interview with Nolan Bushnell. The interview is regarding the movie that is coming out about Atari, but there is talk about casual gaming thrown in there. Nolan Bushnell is the founder of Atari and knows a little about casual gaming, but I don’t necessarily agree with all his comments.

“I think the Wii by Nintendo is getting games that once again are fun for people who don’t want to make a career out of figuring out how to run a 47-button controller,” said Bushnell. “I think that the business right now should be much, much bigger than it is. If it were evenly spread over all demographics and age groups, it’d be huge. But it’s not. It’s basically an 18 to 28 year-old male dominated business of about 15 million. That’s where most of the traffic is. Casual games on the net add to that, but they’re all network-based.”

The main problem I have with this comment is it makes casual gamers sound stupid. It doesn’t take much brain power to use the current controllers for “hard core” gaming systems. I play both casual games and hard core games and I am able to use the controllers for the hard core games without an issue.

I do agree that casual games are helping to broaden the gaming industry and that is a great thing. There are many casual games out there that are not just network based. There are huge portals that push casual games and these games are not just aimed at the male gamer. As a matter of fact most of them are aimed at female game players.

I think Nolan Bushnell was a great contributor to the gaming industry, but I have a different view of the current casual game market than he seems to.

Thanks Next Generation