Nolan Bushnell is about to reveal the biggest number in the history of gaming. He'll come to that number halfway through a conversation about what he's been up to since founding Atari, which jump-started the commercial video game business of today.

The number is 600 trillion, and he'll write it casually on a napkin during an exclusive interview with GameDaily BIZ.

Bushnell says he's always looked at himself as being "a business engineer." As he puts it, "I'm not just dealing with resistors and capacitors, but...economic models. If you innovate an economic model, it could be as important as innovating a game concept."

Recently, Bushnell became chairman of a company called NeoEdge that acts as an ad network for casual games. "I felt that there was going to be a strong advertising component," he says. "It was very clear to me that the casual game market was struggling because of a business model issue. And the 'download 100, sell one' was okay, but it wasn't really an appropriate model. And I felt that advertising had come of age."

Bushnell wanted to be involved in the market, and was introduced to Steve Wood, the chief technologist for NeoEdge. Bushnell found they had what he terms a "fantastic piece of technology," something that could allow "ubiquitous advertising."

He describes it animatedly as a wrapper, which gives digital rights management, reporting of the ads served, even surveying an ad by zip-code. One example is that advertisers can create a thirty-second spot between round one and round two without the game's author being involved. It's quite hard, says Bushnell, to "keep all that going, and not trigger spyware."

He'll even go so far as to personally advertise his chain of uWink restaurants on the NeoEdge platform. "Casual gamers within ten miles of my restaurant? It's a no brainer!"

Industry followers are quite familiar with uWink, but why would a creative visionary like Bushnell want to start a restaurant? Is it just more business engineering? "We want the personal experience and the group experience to be the swamping factor," he explains.

"Not," he adds, "the game zombie of an internet café."

It all started because Bushnell was interested in social gaming. The whole reason for doing the restaurant the way he did is, he says, "I believe there will be a coffee-table game position in the home that will be the provider of the board game experience, but with a little bit of tech."

"What's the essence of that game experience?" Bushnell asks, pausing before answering his own question. "The essence of that game experience is the social experience."

And there's a precedent for such things. "Pong was highly social," he reminds us. Bushnell recalls the early days when the game was introduced to bars. "It was okay for a woman to pull a guy off the bar stool to come and play with her, because it was only a two player game. And so it was like a constant girl's choice in a bar. And it was right at the point of women's liberation...and the number of people who said they've met their husband or wife playing Pong over the years, you know, I bet over a thousand people have said that."

uWink offers a variety of those same social experiences that Bushnell sees as essential to a game experience. And there's other news, such as new locations in Mountain View, California, and in Los Angeles at Hollywood and Highland.

"Probably the most important [aspect] is that we have decided to sell our software to anybody," announces Bushnell. "When you look at numbers..." He asks for a pen. "Right now, we serve about six million games per restaurant." McDonalds famously measured their numbers of burgers sold, but Bushnell measures the games.

"We're going to be selling our software, and right now we've got some inquiries on the part of some really interesting people." Those people find the menu ordering system to be an efficient, labor saving device.

"We've got this thing where I get to serve the games," he says, and they don't care about the games, "and I get a little piece of the revenue."

"I believe that, by 2020, that I can...be in 100,000 restaurants," estimates Bushnell. So at six million per year, he continues, figuring on the napkin, "Zero, zero, zero." He pauses, adding. "Zero, zero."

"Six hundred..." Bushnell says, pausing once more to count just how large this number is. His publicist helpfully guesses how the sentence ends, "Million games?"

But the man responsible for the business of interactive entertainment looks up from his napkin. "Six hundred trillion," he says calmly. And as the number sinks in, "That's a lot," he says. "Now what's wrong with that? A 100,000 restaurants?"