uWink Bistro Blog

LOS ANGELES, Dec 22 (Reuters Life!) - Lovelorn video gamers who are better with consoles than conversation, have a new venue — a restaurant where each table has touchscreens for ordering food and for playing a variety of social games. Entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, founder of the original Atari game company and the children’s U.S. restaurant franchise Chuck E. Cheese, has set up uWink in a shopping mall in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles suburb, to attract an adult dating set.

“This isn’t for 18-year-old testosterone junkies who are into playing ‘Halo’,” Bushnell said, referring to a Microsoft Corp.’s alien shoot-up game. Bushnell, a life-long gamer and uWink’s master game designer, cemented his place in video game history three decades ago when he introduced Atari’s first product — the now legendary table tennis game “Pong” — to the world. He sold Atari in 1976, four years after its was launched.

Bushnell’s new target market is 21 to 35 year old women, although he also hopes to appeal to school kids and families during the day. “If you’ve got a restaurant full of women, you’re automatically going to attract men,” he said.

The new restaurant, which Bushnell wants to franchise, is steeped in LA cool — with dark wood, sleek surfaces, videos projected onto walls, bistro fare and sophisticated adult cocktails. It is a far cry from his first restaurant venture, Chuck E. Cheese, where kids go for pizza, arcade games and birthday cake, although the central theme — gaming — is the same. Nolan, who took Chuck E. Cheese public and left the company in 1983, has already established uWink as a public company that trades under the ticker UWNK.

Each table at uWink has a pair of touchscreens for ordering food and playing conversation-fueling trivia games covering everything from entertainment to politics and sports. The library at uWink, which opened in October this year, already has more than two years of game content, including more than 45,000 questions that update weekly.

But Bushnell wants mingling to be the name of the game at uWink, which hosts “room games” where every table in the restaurant can compete simultaneously. The next level of play, to be introduced soon, is table-to-table competition. Players can stand at so-called party tables and play a fast-paced, six-player game called “Ping” — a tribute to “Pong.”

Bushnell said one of his goals is to take the social risk out of buying a stranger a drink.

“The only thing we’re not going to do is determine who is hot and who’s isn’t,” he joked, referring to hotornot.com, an online dating site where people rate each other’s looks.

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