[Nostalgia History] The Father of Home Video Gaming
I remember back in 1989 when my grandmother bought me a NES. I already had an Atari 2600 that my uncle had no longer wanted, and I played it on a 12 inch or so black & white TV that was in my room (another hand-me down). My favorite game on the Atari was Q-Bert. (Don’t even get me started on that damn E-T game and falling into the holes! What a waste of a game!)
But I wanted that NES! And lucky for me my grandmother was buying. So I got it and a game called The Adventures of Bayou Billy. That game wasn’t the best, but I was able to go down to the video rental place and select from what must have been a hundred games! So yea, I grew up on them.
If you are like me, and love video games, then the man to thank for them is Ralph H. Baer. He is credited with bringing video games into the home.
After serving in WWII, and already skilled in electronics, he went on to receive one of the first degrees in television engineering. In 1951 he was working for Loral Electronics and assigned to design the best TV that he could. He suggested to his boss that he add a game playing feature to the TV, but his boss shot the idea down and told him to “just build the damn TV.”
The TV was a one way interaction, Baer knew that people could interact with it and he never gave up on that idea. He wondered how much more could be done with the technology. He didn’t know about it, but in 1958 the very first video game, Tennis for Two, was played at Brookhaven National Laboratory. But there it stopped and was dismantled in 1959 for spare parts.
In 1966 he was working for a company called Sanders Associates when he approached his boss with a 4-page plan to create a device that someone could use to control the image on the screen to be able to play games. Luckily that one boss, as others in the company dismissed the idea, was the person who saw promise in the idea and gave Baer $2,500 and the help of two other engineers to design a system.
The first actual system they came up with, after a few very early protoypes, was called “The Brown Box”. The birth of the first multiplayer video game console system came in late 1967. It featured two controllers and a light gun accessory. All the games were built in, and you had a choice of football, tennis (ping-pong), roulette, and target shooting for which you would use the gun.
Later on more games were added, and with the aid of program cards you would move the switches as shown to load the games.
Sanders Associates shopped the invention around to the big players in the market, and after no offers from GE, Motorola and Zenith – Magnavox finally offered to have the technology licensed to them. They cleaned it up for the mass market and sold it for $100 as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Selling between 330,000 to 350,000 units over its production run.
This was far less than the smash hit of Pong sold by Atari (which was inspired by the Odyssey). Pong was released in late 1972 in the arcade version, followed by the 1 million+ sold of the home console version in 1975 (it only played pong, unlike the Odyssey). Baer claimed that the poor sales were because Magnavox sold it for $100 instead of the $19.95 Baer wanted it to sell for, that they only sold it at Magnavox electronic stores, and that many customers thought it only worked on Magnavox televisions.
In 1975 Baer started his own consulting business and while he was at a trade fair in 1976 he saw a game from Atari called Touch Me. While the game was horrible, Baer thought the concept was good. He ended up creating the huge hit Simon in 1978 based off that game idea. If you are a child of the 80’s in America then you know this game, as it was huge then. Milton Bradley licensed it from Baer and released it at a midnight party in the famous disco Studio 54. Simon sold over 10 million units by 1982.
He spent much of the rest of his time in lawsuits related to his inventions, both suing and being sued.
In 2006 Mr. Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology, and in 2010 he was added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
He passed away in 2014, at the age of 92. Mr. Baer, I have played the Simon game and have never played your home video game invention but I have spent countless hours on the ones it spawned, so I salute you and your inventiveness.
Enjoy some 70's nostalgia in this video shown at Magnavox stores to advertise the Odyssey.
Back to the future comercial =]]]
There is something about old advertising that is just so awesome to me. Thanks for the comment!
Rest in Peace, Father Maker of Video Games.
Great post! In fact, it was so good that we decided to feature it in our latest newspaper. Read about it here: https://steemit.com/steemplus/@steemplus/steemplus-the-daily-newspaper-that-pays-you-for-recommending-high-quality-content-edition-1
Hey! Thank you so much, I am going to read everyone you featured - and keep on doing it! :-D
Blinding post! Love retrogaming so this was right up my street. The brown box prototype looks very intriguing.
Keep the quality coming, bro, your killing it right now!
Thank you @ezzy, I find these little stories of history fascinating! So what better way than to write an article to share with everyone of steemit? :-D
hehehe were a classic games in the 80s, they were very good!
Yea! Good times :-D
Oh man that brings back some sweet memories, even for me!
Oh, cool. I have absolutely no idea what video games were available in your area of the world!
We had Simon. It was fun and good for memory exercising too.
If you watch this video from where I got it started for about 30 seconds its pretty funny.
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