Leonardo DiCaprio will star as Nolan Bushnell in Atari, a new Paramount Pictures biopic about the man who brought us Pong and Chuck E. Cheese.

Bushnell turned down a number of previous requests to turn his life story into a movie, according to

Variety, but signed off on a pitch by Craig Sherman and Brian Hecker (Bart Got a Room).

DiCaprio, who's also pushing to make Brave New World, knows a little something about ingenious inventor-entrepreneurs, having earned an Oscar nomination for portraying Howard Hughes in The Aviator.

There's a lot of ground to cover: Bushnell co-founded Atari in 1972 on $500, hired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as early employees, and sold the company six years later for $28 million to Warner Communication after inventing the Atari 2600 and the addictive arcade game Pong.

Beginning in 1977, Bushnell developed the Chuck E. Cheese franchise into a 200-restaurant chain. A millionaire by age 39, he then survived a number of ups and downs. Remember Androbot? Probably not.

Now 65 and living in Los Angeles, Bushnell, who has eight kids, told Wired.com in a 2005 interview focused on his uWink interactive game: "The subtle generational cues that make one thing cool and another uncool aren't always obvious to a parent. My children are my dinner-table sounding board. I've come up with some wonderful ideas that they universally dismissed as 'lame.'"

Bushnell sees gaming as a social activity first and foremost. He said, "The number of people who have told me that they met their future spouse playing Pong is huge."

Photo of Leonardo DiCaprio courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

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