In a recent interview, Nolan Bushnell, who created Atari, took the time out to give his views on a few things, most notably his own ex-company and the console war. He gives a very honest opinion, and certainly doesn’t beat around the bush with his answers.

Q: What do you think of Atari? It’s much different from the company you founded in 1971.

A: It really isn’t a part of today’s gaming world in any meaningful way. They lost the cachet of being a leading technology company in the games space.

He must look back and wonder where it all went wrong. He invented the first home video game that we will all remember, the classic Pong. Now, all Atari do is release their “classics” on Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, and presumably will also have downloadable stuff for the PS3 and Wii. And they had the Driver series, but the only good ones were the two on PS1, so the less said about that the better.

Q: What about Sony’s PlayStation 3 Strategy?

A: I think Sony shot themselves in the foot… there is a high probability [they] will fail. The price point is probably unsustainable. For years and years Sony has been a very difficult company to deal with from a developer standpoint. They could get away with their arrogance and capriciousness because they had an installed base. They have also historically had horrible software tools. You compare that to the Xbox 360 with really great authoring tools [and] additional revenue streams from Xbox live… a first party developer would be an idiot to develop for Sony first and not the 360. People don’t buy hardware, they buy software.

Q: But what about Sony’s success with the PlayStation and PS2? They sold more than 100 million of each system.

A: It wasn’t anything brilliant that they did. With the PS and PS2 it was timing. They had the right pricing at the right time [and were] almost the accidental winner. It would not surprise me if a year from now they’ll be struggling to sell 1 million units. [Factoring in the PS3’s price], I think in the U.S. the number of early adopters you have is actually around 300,000.

Bold words, suggesting less than 400,000 people in the US would want a PS3, especially as people are already queuing for it. I would be inclined to believe that the shortage problems suffered by the Xbox 360 will be replicated with the PS3; everyone will be wanting one because they do have some promise, and it will get better as the years go on. Even with the high pricepoint, 400,000 isn’t really a lot, so I think there will be 400,000 not put off by the pricetag. That’s the other 125 million that are!

But we shall see. With the lauch just over a week away, Sony are probably sweating, praying that people do want their product. We should know by the following Tuesday whether or not all their launch stock was sold.