UWink serves food, games for adults

LOS ANGELES (AP) — With Chuck E. Cheese, Nolan Bushnell created a place where a kid can be a kid. At his new restaurant in the suburban San Fernando Valley, an adult can be a kid.

UWink Media Bistro is a mash-up of Bushnell's greatest hits.

As founder of Atari Inc., the Ogden native who graduated from the University of Utah created the electronic table-tennis game "Pong" and the Atari 2600 game console, which together jump-started the video game industry in the 1970s.

His next commercial venture, Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater, proved that the unlikely combination of animatronic mice and pepperoni could indeed mix.

His new restaurant, uWink, distills the two ideas, seeking to re-create the infectious fun of early arcade games while serving food for a more mature palate such as slow-roasted pork and crispy calamari.

At uWink, food and frolic are delivered through interactive touch-screen displays, which stand back-to-back like pup tents in the center of every table.

Guests can use those screens to place orders, challenge one another to a quick trivia game or giggle about a palm reading. It's designed to appeal to women, who flock to such computer games as solitaire and "Bejeweled" but have been largely ignored by console game developers.

The spare, sleek lines of the interior, the angular seats and the light walls that serve as video projection screens lend it a futuristic feel that complements the electronica.

Whether it's a recipe for success remains to be seen. The company is so strapped for cash, Bushnell had to personally sign the lease for its first location.

Playing games is his life's work. Now 64 and living in upscale Brentwood, this gray-bearded giant of a man hasn't let the kid in him die. Respected technologists consider him a one-man incubator, whose agile mind dreams up personal robots, talking teddy bears and other fanciful concepts sometimes long before they're commercially viable.

"In the early days of the video game business, everybody played," Bushnell said. "The question is, what happened? My theory — and I think it's pretty well borne out — is that in the '80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer."