Bushnell a little "nervous about" always-online emphasis

Industry legend Nolan Bushnell has said he's a bit worried over an always-online future, especially should games stored to the cloud be lost forever if a company decides to shut a server down.

Speaking with GI International, Bushnell said he's worried that online-only will eventually impact game preservation efforts.

"I'm actually nervous about that a little bit," he said. "I played games 30 years ago that I would like to be playing right now. Particularly since I have some quirky tastes and some of the stuff I really thought was important, not many other people did. So it sort of fell into the trash heap of society.

"With the coin-op game business, I wanted to keep one of every game we ever had, but the number of times various people said, 'Gee, why don't we get rid of these old things...'"

Bushnell believes some preservation efforts are underway, but that many game companies aren't working hard enough to preserve those works.

He said he observed the same sort of attitude decades ago when he was head at Atari.