Ralph Baer: Heading Home on an Odyssey

Born in Germany in 1922, Magnavox Odyssey creator Ralph Baer and his family escape amidst the growing Nazi tyranny and emigrate to the United States in 1938, when Baer is 16. Graduating from a correspondence course in radio repair, in 1939 – 40 he runs his own radio repair service in New York City. With the outbreak of the war in Europe, Baer serves three years in the US Army, from 1943 – 1946, the final two years overseas during WWII assigned to Military Intelligence. After leaving the army, via the G.I. Bill, in 1949 he graduates from the American Television Institute of Technology (ATIT) in Chicago with a B.S. in Television Engineering. In 1951 he is employed by U.S. defense contractor Loral Electronics Corporation, based out of New York City.

Odyssey creator Ralph Baer speaks at the 1977 Gametronics Conference, San Francisco

Among other assignments at Loral, he is given the task to develop “the world’s best television receiver”, a projection TV system  that would include so many technical advances that the public couldn’t help but want it, no matter what the price. It is during this project that his thoughts turn to the passive nature of television and how to tap into the market of 62 million homes already with at least one TV set, but his idea of working an interactive on-screen sports game into the design comes to naught as Loral brass decide the market wouldn’t bear the ultimate cost of their revolutionary TV. Still, Baer won’t forget his TV game concept, what eventually will become the Magnavox Odyssey. Having moved to Nashua, New Hampshire-based military contractor Sanders Associates by 1966, Baer continues to mull over his interactive television concept and one day while waiting for an associate at a New York City bus terminal he scratches down his concepts for a TV based videogame system, which he later transcribes into a 4 page paper. In this he outlines a low-cost device for attaching to a standard TV set, along with a list of game categories that would become staples in the industry, such as Action, Puzzle, Instructional and Sports.

Sanders Associates logo, 1967

Ralph Baer Has Fun In the Game Room

By now the division manager of electronic design at Sanders, Baer has nearly 500 engineers and technicians at his disposal, along with the ability to authorize various projects dealing with electronics. He draws up a schematic based on his TV game design and begins developing the system on the side, and by late 1966 has breadboarded a symbol generator creating manually controlled spots of light that can chase each other around on a B&W TV set he finds in one of the labs. With the help of fellow Sanders employees Bob Tremblay and Bob Solomon, Bear continues his work in a lab inside Sanders on the sixth floor of the company’s Canal Street facility. Only Baer and his team have keys to this 10 x 15 ft. secret lair, invariably dubbed the “Game Room”. Scuttlebutt starts to pass between the hundreds of technicians in the building about just what the heck could be going on in there.

The brown-box prototype

By December of that year they are ready to demonstrate a system that uses the moving spots in a rudimentary game. By using two circuits known as spot generators, they create a simple electronic game of “tag” with two spots chasing each other, if one is caught by the other it is wiped out. In January of 1967 Baer puts technician Bill Harrison to work to build the first multi-game unit. It plays chase games, has a light gun and a variety of other games, including a version of hockey where both impact velocity and angle geometry of shots are replicated. Through its various numbered iterations, the game system is titled TV Game Unit. It is more commonly referred to in the lab as the Brown Box, due to the wood-grain adhesive vinyl applied around the chassis by Harrison in an attempt to make the whole thing more attractive as a consumer device. Inside the faux wood casing is all discrete components; IC technology, at a price of over a dollar per chip in 1967, even in quantity, is too dear. ICs come with the additional issue of power consumption that is too high to work with the battery-powered design of Baer’s game unit. After demonstrating the system to a group of executives at Sanders, including founder Royden Sanders, there is talk that Baer and his team are wasting company resources and that the game project be scrapped. The future of video games is only saved by the shooting prowess of Sanders corporate director of research and development Herbert Campman, who develops a skill at hitting the on-screen spot targets with Baer’s light gun rifle from the hip, and becomes more friendly to the project. Further work on the TV Game Unit is approved and funds and additional resources are forwarded. Now working alongside Baer and Harrison is engineer Bill Rusch, a highly creative, if not always super motivated, engineer. Rusch designs a new game, and it is perhaps not surprising that it too harkens back to an archetypal playground activity, using three spot generators to produce two onscreen paddles along with a ball in a game of “catch”. Baer and Harrison further refine the play so that the ball can be served from off-screen when it has been missed by a player, creating a simple ping-pong game. We are ever closer to what will be the Magnavox Odyssey,

Watch and listen to Ralph Baer introduce the world to the video game, 1968 video

In early 1968 Baer files for the first video game patent, and by the end of that year they again demonstrate the system, capable of switching between ping-pong, volleyball, handball, hockey and even several shooting games to be used with a newly designed light-gun. Further, the games are outputting FM sound through a new colour 17″ RCA console purchased for the project early in 1967. Yes, in 1967 Baer has developed a TV game unit with colour: their ping-pong game is displayed over a field of green, with hockey taking place over ice blue. Midway through the year the TV Game box is finished, and feelers go out to have the technology licensed to interested parties.

Participatory Cable Television

As Baer and his team continue to refine the devices, eyes are turned to the developing cable TV market. The gaming device is bundled into an over-arching, viewer-interactive cable TV system called PCATV or Participatory Cable Television. This visionary system is meant to provide interactive TV games and an automated “impulse buying” at-home shopping system, all through a modular APB or All-Purpose-Box that would hook up to people’s television sets. It is even surmised by Baer that a television station will transmit via cable lines more detailed background graphics for the TV Game to be displayed on, backgrounds like a Vegas gambling table for electronic games of chance. This concept is further developed in a test between Sanders and a Warners Communications cable station in Boston: randomly moving symbols representing hockey players are broadcast over cable lines to Sanders, over which the dots of the TV Game Unit are superimposed. While their movement is random, Baer is surprised at how often the player figures correspond with the manually controlled electronic blips, making the whole game much more realistic and exciting. 

Ralph Baer poses with the operating Brown Box video game prototype, 2000

The PCATV system is first demonstrated to Irving B. Kahn of TelePrompTer, a company that had initially developed their namesake device and had since invested into the cable industry. Ultimately PCATV is deemed a bit too far-reaching for the moment, and in 1969 Baer gets together with Lou Etlinger, Sanders’ Director of Patents, to spin off the game unit. They invite all of the major TV manufacturers of the time to Sanders for a demonstration of the new gaming hardware, in hopes of finding a licensee for the technology. Several companies express interest, such as G.E., Sylvania, Philco, Motorola, and Magnavox. Sanders gets very close to a deal with RCA, which falls through at the 11th hour.

The Magnavox Odyssey, with game card inserted, playing cards surrounding unit

The Magnavox Video Game

Bill Enders, a member of the RCA team, is nevertheless very impressed with the demonstration, and when he takes a vice president position at Magnavox he convinces the company of the virtues of TV Game Unit. A demo by Baer and Etlinger at Magnavox headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana further impresses TV marketing division vice president Gerry Martin, and Magnavox agrees to hand-tool some units for testing in some of their dealers across the country in 1971. When these tests are met with encouraging results, Magnavox purchases exclusive rights to the device and all rights to patents and know-how. Sanders is to receive royalties of 50 cents per game sold,  with Magnavox required to aggressively pursue all infringers on related Sanders patents. After test-marketing in the Philadelphia area of what Magnavox initially calls the SKILL-O-VISION TV Game, they do some further development of the system and eventually announce the first ever commercially available home videogame system as the Magnavox Odyssey in May of 1972, with units rolling off the line in quantity that summer for an August release.

The Odyssey games: Table Tennis, a launch title for the Odyssey, released in 1972

The Odyssey games: Basketball, released in 1973

The Odyssey games: Interplanetary Voyage, released in 1973

But while Baer had envisioned a cheap TV add-on retailing around $29.95, Odyssey sells for $100, with around 305 discrete parts within the case and controllers. While in the lab Baer and his team had had the various games displayed with backgrounds in colour and with sound, Magnavox cuts costs by going strictly black and white and no audio capabilities. The graphics are so rudimentary that the system comes with a set of two sizes of colour mylar overlays to put on the television screen to represent the various playfields, including Tennis and Hockey. There are 12 different plug-in circuit boards included to make the machine play different games: Table Tennis, Football, Haunted House, Tennis, Skiing, Analogic, Hockey, States, Submarine, Cat & Mouse, Roulette and Simon Sez. They contain no ROM components found in later programmable systems like the Channel F. They do, however, serve as a power switch for the unit. Also included are two controllers, rectangular boxes with rotary knobs for vertical as well as horizontal control of the player bats. An additional “english” knob allows players to curve the ball vertically after hitting it towards their opponent, which compensates for the lack of any kind of physics model in the ball trajectory. To help buyers of the game system get any kind of play value from two controllable spots appearing on their TV screens, Magnavox must include with the basic Odyssey video game package a cluttered pack-in kit consisting of the overlays and six plug-in game cards, a pack of game cards to tell gamers what to do, poker chips, play money, scorecards with tokens (as the machine itself can not calculate or display any scores), game boards and a pair of dice. It’s clear that the limitations of the system require the participation of gamers to utilize all of these physical aids in order to play “video games”.

TV commercial introducing the Magnavox Odyssey video game system, 1972

The Odyssey game console is featured in this ad break on the Magnavox holiday Sinatra special, 1973 Magnavox sells 100,000 units of its electronic “game simulator” during the fall/winter season of 1972, boosted by a TV broadcast hosted by Frank Sinatra, where he demonstrates the console for the audience. The Magnavox Odyssey would also be highlighted in the 1973 Frank Sinatra: Ol’ Blue Eyes is Back special over the holiday season of 1973. Advertising material for the console is handled by design firm Lehner Bradford and Cout., who also develop the Master Strategy series of games for the later Odyssey² by Magnavox. One problem with moving the Odyssey video game from store shelves occurs due to the public’s belief, exacerbated by the company’s misleading ad campaigns and salespeople, that the game needs a Magnavox TV to play them. As well, initial distribution is limited to official Magnavox dealers, seriously limiting Odyssey‘s sales potential.

The Magnavox Odyssey Becomes Patently Profitable

Even so, for three years Magnavox has the only home videogame available on the market, with a refined Odyssey introduced in 1974 that adjusts the size and square shape of the on-screen player spots and ball to more closely resemble PONG, introduced as a coin-op video game by Atari two years previous. The revision also keeps the ball in play on the screen without it wandering out of view. In total eventually 333,000 of the original Magnavox Odyssey video game units and light rifle packages are sold before the system is discontinued in 1975….replaced by a new game line introducing the Odyssey 100 and 200 electronic table tennis games that simplify things and eschew all of the pack-in bric-a-brac of the original. These versions also introduce sound effects, new game modes like single-player Smash, as well as offer on-screen scoring indicators. 1975 is the same year as the introduction of home PONG by Atari. Magnavox has been highly distracted over this period of the Odyssey‘s release: the company’s Consumer Electronics Division faces mounting losses in the tens of millions as they are slow in converting their line of televisions with solid-state components. The new Odyssey video game line, along with Atari’s PONG and other companies that hop on the electronic ping-pong bandwagon, spur a buying frenzy among consumers that has most units sold out over the 1975 holiday season, with an average MSRP of $99. Units are picked up in order to appease the adults in the family as much as their kids.

As part of their licensing agreement with Sanders and Baer, holder of the first videogame patent, along with a number of additional patents covering certain game features common to most of the following sports games, Magnavox moves to protect these patents by launching multiple lawsuits against manufacturers of dedicated video game systems. Atari is the target of one such legal action, resulting in a $700,000 payout over PONG and foreign rights. Later in 1979, Magnavox also files suit against makers of programmable systems such as Fairchild and Bally, along with a suit and payment of $16 million from Mattel over their Intellivision. All this litigation results in nearly one-hundred million dollars in license fees and legal judgments.

Ralph Baer with his arcade game creation Skate-N-Score, 1977

Back to the period just after the release of Odyssey and the subsequent outbreak of PONG, Ralph Baer makes a trip to Chicago and the November 1973 Music Operators of America (MOA) trade show, scouting out patent infringers. The display floor is booming with PONG clones, and when Baer returns to Sanders his boss looks at his memo listing the tens of thousands of PONG type units being sold and poses the question: “Why aren’t we in this business?”. Thusly is Baer forwarded some R&D cash and set up with a team of engineers to design upright arcade games, the highlight of which is to be a new circuit design that simulates realistic velocity and geometry functions, created by Bill Rusch. The ice conditions in the hockey game can even be adjusted from slick to mushy, according to the players’ skill. Several prototype units of three arcade TV sports games, titled Skate-N-Score, Hit-N-Run, and Pro-Soccer are created and then tested out in the field at a local arcade in Salem, NH called Electro Games. They get an encouraging reception from players, easily beating other games from competitors like Atari and Midway. Sander’s wariness over committing to the arcade market, along with a strict interpretation of the previous TV game technology agreement with Magnavox, eventually sinks the whole coin-op venture.

Baer accepts National Medal of Technology and Innovation from 43th U.S. President George W. Bush, 2004

Magnavox follows up the pioneering Odyssey with refined versions, including the Odyssey 100 and 200 models. Bear’s original concept of a built-in TV/Videogame hybrid comes to fruition with Magnavox’s release of the $499 Model 4305 19-inch television set, featuring an electronic ping-pong, hockey and smash game available at the touch of a button. Two controllers, with 12ft. cords and game difficulty and reset switches are included. By the end of 1976, the industry Baer and his team have helped create has sold between three to four million game consoles in the U.S., or about $200 million worth. Baer himself continues to invent and develop a remarkable number of videogame and electronic toy and game patents, with many ending up on the production line and to great success. Baer’s Simon for Milton-Bradley is a particular standout. Some others include a prototypal system to play games through cable TV, the first VCR based “nested data” interactive TV gaming system, the Smarty Bear VCR-cued interactive plush toy, and the Bike Max talking bicycle computer. In 2004, Ralph H. Baer is awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, Hardware, “For his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms.” Ralph Baer, the creator of Magnavox Odyssey, first home video game system, passes away on Dec. 6, 2014… although the industry he helped create lives on.

Ralph Baer in 2009 at the Games Convention Online, holding Brown Box controllers