From a pure games business perspective, David Perry of Gaikai gave perhaps the most interesting presentation at last week’s [a]list summit in Napa, California, but it was Atari founder Nolan Bushnell who made the most entertaining speech. Bushnell, who earlier this year rejoined Atari on its board of directors, reminisced about his past and the early days of the industry, but he quickly moved on to talk excitedly about all the big technologies on the horizon, which may or may not make it into games.

He began by joking, “Do I want to be this retro-focused historical fossil?” He added that his kids always remind him of how “lame” he is. He then proceeded to briefly detail the history of games and Atari – Atari started in 1970, Pong arcade released in ’72, in ’75 consumer Pong ships, ’77 Atari 2600 VCS ships. Interestingly, while Atari shipped 15,000 Pong machines, other companies made knockoffs and shipped 160,000 units, so Atari only had under 10 percent market share. The answer, he said, was to out innovate everyone else – a lesson that no doubt can be applied to today’s game market as well.

Before moving on, he also joked that it’s the first time he’s been able to make a Powerpoint presentation with the Atari logo, because Powerpoint didn’t exist last time he did anything for Atari.

Bushnell then talked about the diversity of economic models in today’s game industry, and how smartphone gaming will take over all mobile games. He’s personally a huge iPhone and iPad fan, and earlier in the day, when mingling among the [a]listers, he was showing off some of his favorite iPad apps on his own shiny iPad.

The technology he’s really excited about though is augmented reality, which he said will be “massive.” Because the phone can recognize where you’re pointing it, you could, for example, go into a store and quickly get info on screen overlaying the image of the item and providing you with useful info on the product. This sort of augmented reality could be used for some very interesting game applications in the real world, and creative brand marketers could no doubt have a total field day with it.

He also highlighted GPS aware games and plugged his own son’s company, Dopple Games, which he half jokingly said he’d sell to Google for $1 billion.

Bushnell believes that bioimplants will play a large role in gaming’s future as well, and he illustrated several examples, such as wearing contact lenses with chips that can provide augmented reality, and he said that games and robots would ultimately merge.

Coming back to Atari, Bushnell said that keys to success were a focus on innovation, but also that the workers were irreverent. “We were wiling to mess with people,” he said. He really didn’t care how things were done, so long as they got done – “abandon process, focus on outcomes,” he said. He stressed that Atari was a meritocracy, and the wages from the people who were laid off were used to fund the raises for Atari’s best workers.

In the follow-up Q&A session with the attendees, Bushnell also talked about how Pong became so successful. He said that “people at leisure are incredibly stupid.” They apparently lose 10-25 IQ points, he said, so you should never give them too much credit. Additionally, Pong had the advantage of appealing to women, because of women’s fine motor skills they could beat men at the game, and it made it very exciting for women to challenge men and even beat them. It was the perfect date game, he said.

Looking back, however, Bushnell does have some regrets. He never wanted to sell Atari. “I was stupid,” he lamented, “I sold completely because I didn’t understand Wall Street.” He said he knew Atari needed to raise more money, and he thought that they needed to look at a strategic investor. He also confessed that he was “tired” and he typically gets “5-year ADD” with any of his companies. He said he simply gets bored with each venture after 5 years. “In retrospect, I really wish I hadn’t sold it,” he said about Atari.