Founder of Atari opens up on the future of competitive gaming during Malta Week

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Nolan Bushnell, American businessman and electrical engineer who established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre chain joined us during Malta Week in keynote panels and discussions. On the Ikigai stage, Bushnell addressed the audience with the topic ‘The future of competitive gaming.’

“What a great way to have a convention about everything that is fun,” Bushnell said in his opening line. To characterise digitisation, Nolan Bushnell discusses the transition from atoms to bits.

Bushnell notes the revolution in the way commerce is done with the power of bits. An entrepreneur may now use the internet to generate interest in their business and obtain funding for it. Since the internet allows pieces of information to be accessible from a variety of devices and from all over the world, an entrepreneur can now reach out to a far bigger audience to share their idea and raise financing. Because of bits, a once-impossible endeavor can suddenly become a reality.

On this note, he gives the audience various examples of how this is being actioned. The world of z and NFTs is currently valued at millions of dollars. He goes on to further question if this is a rational world that we’re living in. How did four NFT Novices create a billion-dollar ecosystem of cartoon apes? he asked. “It’s a ticket into their version of the metaverse. This is just the start.”

In the second part of his speech, Bushnell goes on to ask if cryptocurrencies will be the future of online gaming. “I believe crypto in gaming will be more important in the next 3 years than fiat. Seamless, secure online transactions are so much better than fiat. Things that are easy win every time.”

In recent years, cryptocurrency has become a worldwide phenomenon. The ease of cryptocurrencies benefits a variety of sectors, and one of those industries is online gaming. Because there is no central authority issuing cryptocurrency, it is resistant to government influence and manipulation. Bitcoin is the most widely used blockchain-based cryptocurrency.

Bushnell says “I personally believe that in 5 years 80% of the coins will go away. I hope you don’t own any of them. But all the ones that I own are going to be immensely valuable.”

Litecoin, Peercoin, and Namecoin, as well as Ethereum, Cardano, and EOS, are all competing cryptocurrencies.

He further expands on regulation stating that in his eyes the metaverse will be a brave new world of unregulated ideas. “The thing that’s fun about metaverse is, do we know what the rules are?”

Right now what we’re doing is innovating in the metaverse. “This event is proof of a start of the craziness of this world in which bits are everything and atoms don’t matter.”

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