Games - Bruno Bonnell

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	Games - Bruno Bonnell

Bruno Bonnell is one of the founders of Infogrames Entertainment SA. A qualified chemical engineer, Bonnell received a degree in economics at the Université Paris IX. He began his long career on the T07, one of the earliest French-produced home computers, before founding Infogrames (today Atari) in June 1983 at the age of 25 with Christophe Sapet and Thomas Schmider. He has been chairman and chief creative officer of the company from 1983 to the present day. He is also chief executive officer of the company – a position he has held since 1983 until a stockholder vote in 2003 showed a lack of confidence in Bonnell’s management of the company’s debts. He stepped down as CEO (while retaining his other two positions) in 2004 to be replaced by James Caparro, although he took up the position again on a temporary basis when Caparro resigned in June 2005, and holds it to this day.

In 1995, Bonnell was elected president of the Syndicat des Editeurs de Logiciels de Loisirs (SELL), a French games developers' association.

He has worked together with French broadcaster Canal Plus to create the television channel Game One, which was specifically aimed at a gaming audience. Intended as a European channel, Game One has however only been broadcast in the French language.

Bonnell is known for spearheading many of the takeovers of many smaller (and a few larger) development studios over the 1980s and 1990s, most notably British development house Ocean Software and Atari, as well as GT Interactive, Accolade, Gremlin Graphics and Legend. All of these companies were integrated into the Infogrames infrastructure with the brand name completely disappearing, with one exception – Atari, which Bonnell felt was far too valuable a brand name to simply disintegrate into the Infogrames name. It was for this reason that Infogrames was renamed Atari Games in 2001.

Beyond his involvement in Infogrames/Atari, Bonnell is also a shareholder in Lyons' UEFA soccer team and the Olympique Lyonnais.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bruno Bonnell ]

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