Stay hungry, stay humble, is really good advice because “hubris costs you more money than anything,” said industry icon and Atari founder Nolan Bushnell at Tech Bloc’s annual rally in San Antonio.

Industry advocacy group Tech Bloc on Thursday brought Bushnell, considered the father of video gaming, to headline its rally at Rackspace’s headquarters.

Bushnell, 74, who founded Atari in 1972 and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theater a few years later as a place to install his video games, told the audience about both his triumphs and a notable failure.

“I did this robot, and I lost a whole bunch of money,” Bushnell said, showing the audience a picture of a robot.

Bushnell reportedly sunk a lot of his own money into his firm Androbot, which was trying to create a personal robot, Fast Company reported. But “they soon realized that their ambitions were exceeding reality,” as Fast Company aptly puts it. They had over-promised on what they could deliver.

“You know what happens? The things that make you successful also cause you to screw up,” Bushnell continued. “You fall in love with something, and you get blinded to it, and plus that: you get cocky. You get hubris.”

More Information Nolan Bushnell on... The future: “Right now we’re looking down two roads. One is going to be the road of massive disruption. And the other side is massive benefit. And you’ll see, in the next 10 years, more conflict with Luddites than… anyone else. Because the creative destruction of change is going to give a lot of people a lot of fear.” Augmented reality company Magic Leap: “Magic Leap looks like a real disaster. Raised way too much money. And a lot of people don’t realize when you raise a billion dollars as a startup, you are bound to have a cluster-f. Why? When you hire too quickly, you don’t get the right people, and you don’t give time to have the team come together and all of the sudden you get politics till the cows come home. And if there’s anything that’s toxic, it’s politics. You have to fire political people.” Augmented reality: “Pokémon Go. Went up like a rocket and down like a… rock. Why? It was fun getting out and running around, but the game was thin. So one of the things I’m going to be doing in the next little while is I’ve got a couple of ideas around evil monkeys. It turns out that in another plane, just under this one — I mean it’s the same plane but you can only see it through your phone —there are evil monkeys. You know the evil monkeys are there because whenever you put your headphones in your pocket and you pull them out they’re all tangled up. Who did that? It was evil monkeys. And so with this game you’re going to be able to push the evil monkeys back into another plane, therefore making the world safer for humanity. So I just wanted to let you know that you can look forward to that.” Education: “We have a system that was designed to teach interchangeable factory workers. And it hasn’t really changed. You will know that you’ve gotten a decent school system when you have no grades, and no grades… I have to drop my skills to the average of the third grade. And there’s one third grader that’s being taught at the right speed. Half on the top are bored, and the other half are lost. Why do we put up with this? It should be individual. We should have individual, and we should have mastery.” Future unemployment: “Future unemployment is caused by one: bad government. Before you pull a lever to vote someone into office, decide if they’re Luddites or not… You need to make sure that you have politicians elected that are going to be constituencies of the future and not the constituencies of the past. The minute you hear a politician saying ‘I’m going to save jobs,’ boot him out. If you hear a politician saying ‘I’m going to help you make new jobs,’ that’s cool. Because a lot of things need to be done.”

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He also put forth his vision for the future, where many jobs today are replaced through technology, so those workers can go on to other big projects, according to Bushnell.

“Why do people talk about unemployment? There’s a whole bunch of stuff that needs to be done,” Bushnell said. “Let’s get rid of as many jobs as we possibly can through technology and put them on these cool things.”

The “cool things” Bushnell mentioned included everything from future hyperloops to self-driving cars moving through underground tunnels.

“Notice in all these pictures of the future you don’t see cars? Where are they? They’re underground. So we can do tunnels, and cars are electric, and we don’t have to see out because we don’t have to have drivers anymore. And all the windows instead are now screens,” Bushnell said. “So when I go to work every day I can get in the car and choose my adventure. One day I’m going to be driving down the streets of India. The next day I’m going to be driving down the streets of Mars.”

He also seemed impressed with the Alamo City.

“I think that San Antonio, you’re better than you think you are,” Bushnell told the crowd.

San Antonio, he said, has a critical mass.

“I mean the fact that you can fill this room with nerds,” he joked to a few cheers.

Bushnell was famously Steve Jobs’ first boss and turned down an offer to buy a third of Apple for $50,000. When he brought it up on Thursday he put up a slide that said “1/3 of Apple Computer. For $50,000,” with a frowning face emoji.

He said he regretted the decision, “but we cannot live our life in the rearview mirror.”

“I hired Steve Jobs, and Steve was a handful,” Bushnell said of the young Jobs. “But his biggest problem was that he thought that he didn’t have to shower... We got a lot of complaints so I decided to put him on the night shift, the engineering night shift, for which we didn’t have one.”

Asked after his remarks about his best and worst boss, Bushnell said “The problem I have is I’m kind of unemployable.”

“So I haven’t actually had very many bosses. My best boss was my boss at the amusement park that I worked at summers,” he told the Express-News. “It was really hands on and I think that I learned — it was like an M.B.A. I had 150 kids working for me, and he was relentless about, you know, inventory percentages and turning of inventory and training the people.”

Rackspace former president Lew Moorman and founders Dirk Elmendorf and Graham Weston, the company’s former chairman, also spoke at the event, talking about how Rackspace came to be the company it is today.

Rackspace is to San Antonio what Intel was to Silicon Valley in the early days, Bushnell said in the interview after his remarks.

“In Silicon Valley the anchor when I was there was Intel,” Bushnell said. “And Rackspace is providing a lot of that same thing. We went to big things at Intel in the early days of Atari. So I’m very impressed.”

San Antonio is also a more cost-effective city for starting a business, Bushnell said.

“The thing that you don’t realize is that from an entrepreneurial standpoint, a startup in San Antonio is going to probably cost half as much capital as it would in Silicon Valley,” Bushnell said. “The costs in Silicon Valley have just exploded. If you’re an engineer making $200,000, you’re living like a pauper. Really. Because the taxes are high.”

sehlinger@express-news.net | Twitter: @samehlinger