Nolan Kay Bushnell (born February 5, 1943) is an American businessman and electrical engineer. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain. He has been inducted into the Video Game Hall of Fame and the Consumer Electronics Association Hall of Fame, received the BAFTA Fellowship and the Nations Restaurant News "Innovator of the Year" award and was named one of Newsweek's "50 Men Who Changed America". He has started more than 20 companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. He is on the board of Anti-Aging Games. In 2012, he founded an educational software company called Brainrush that uses video game technology in educational software.

He is credited with Bushnell's Law, an aphorism about games that are "easy to learn and difficult to master" being rewarding.

Bushnell was born in 1943 in Clearfield, Utah in a middle-class family who were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He attended Davis High School in the nearby town of Kaysville, Utah. Bushnell enrolled at Utah State University in 1961 to study engineering and then later business. In 1964, he transferred to the University of Utah College of Engineering, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He was a member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

He married his first wife, Paula Rochelle Nielson, in 1966 and had two daughters. In 1969, they moved to California. They divorced in 1975 just prior to Warner Communication's purchase of Atari. Near the end of 1977, he married Nancy Nino, with whom he had six children. He also used his profit from selling Atari to Warner to purchase the former mansion of coffee magnate James Folger in Woodside, California.

Although he was a Latter-day Saint in his youth, by the time of his first divorce he had forgone the teachings often being called a "lapsed Mormon". He said that he stopped practicing the faith after he got into a debate over the interpretation of the Bible with a professor at the University of Utah's Institute of Religion while in college.

Bushnell worked at Lagoon Amusement Park for many years while attending college. He was made manager of the games department two seasons after starting. While working there, he became familiar with arcade electro-mechanical games, watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery while learning how it worked, developing his understanding of how the game business operates. He was also interested in the Midway arcade games, where theme park customers would have to use skill and luck to ultimately achieve the goal and win the prize. He liked the concept of getting people curious about the game and from there getting them to pay the fee in order to play.

While in college, he worked for several employers, including Litton Guidance and Control Systems, Hadley Ltd, and the industrial engineering department at the U of U. For several summers, he built his own advertising company, Campus Company, which produced blotters for four universities and sold advertising space around a calendar of events. He also sold copies of Encyclopedia Americana.

After graduating, Bushnell had moved to California from Utah with the hopes of being hired by Disney, but the company was not in the routine practice of hiring fresh college graduates. Instead, Bushnell got a job as an electrical engineer with Ampex. At Ampex, he met fellow employee Ted Dabney and found they had common interests. Bushnell shared his ideas of creating pizza parlors filled with electronic games with Dabney, and took Dabney to the computing labs at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to show him Spacewar!.