Nolan Bushnell Wu stated, "Nolan Bushnell deserves to be honored, but this is not the right time for it. It's easy to draw a line between the culture he created at Atari and the structural sexism women in tech face today." The hashtag "#NotNolan" was shared by those with similar complaints about the GDC's choice. The following day, the Advisory Committee reconsidered the selection of Bushnell for the award and announced the Pioneer Award would not be awarded, and instead it would be used that year to "honor the pioneering and unheard voices of the past". GDC further stated that they believed
Galaxy Game were well into development and had gotten permission to place the machine at the Tresidder student union building at Stanford as a test site. It was then that they received a call from Nolan Bushnell, who had heard of their project and wanted to show them his similar project he was working on. Bushnell had also played "Spacewar" during the 1960s and wanted to make an arcade game version of it, but had gone in a different technological direction. He and Ted Dabney had initially started with a US$4,000 Data General Nova computer which they thought would be powerful enough