In 1966 some forty million American homes had a television set, and every one of them could only show what the broadcasters sent. Ralph Baer, chief engineer for equipment design at a defence contractor in New Hampshire, wanted to plug something into them that people could play. Six years later Magnavox sold his idea as the Odyssey, the first video game console for the home. Along the way, the patents that came out of his lab made Atari and many others pay for the right to put a bouncing ball on a screen.
Fast facts
- Born: 8 March 1922, in Germany; his family reached New York in 1938.
- Employer: Sanders Associates, Nashua, New Hampshire, a defence electronics firm, from 1959 until 1988.
- The idea: a four-page disclosure dated 1 September 1966, describing games played on an ordinary TV set.
- The Brown Box: the last of the prototypes built at Sanders between 1966 and 1968, which Magnavox licensed.
- Magnavox Odyssey: launched in 1972, about 100,000 sold that year.
- Simon: the electronic memory game, designed with Howard Morrison and sold by Milton Bradley from 1978.
- Honours: National Medal of Technology, presented by President George W. Bush on 13 February 2006.
- Died: 6 December 2014, at home in Manchester, New Hampshire, aged 92.
From Germany to television engineering
Baer grew up Jewish in Nazi Germany. “I’m Jewish and that was a bit of a problem then,” he told Video Games in 1983; he had been expelled from his school, and his family left for New York in 1938. He served in military intelligence in the Second World War, then studied on the GI Bill at the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. He called the result, earned in 1948, the first bachelor’s degree in television engineering.
His first thought of games came early. In 1951, building a television set at Loral Electronics in the Bronx, he suggested putting some kind of game into it to make it stand out. The chief engineer, he recalled in his book, told him to get on with the set: he was behind schedule. Baer spent the next fifteen years in defence electronics. He joined Sanders Associates in Nashua in 1959 and ran a division that at times held 500 engineers and technicians, none of them working on television.
A bus terminal and four pages
In the summer of 1966, on a business trip to New York, Baer sat on a step outside a bus terminal waiting for a colleague and filled a notepad with ideas for playing games on a home TV set. Back in his office on 1 September he wrote them up as a four-page disclosure, and had the engineer Bob Solomon read, date and initial each page so there was a legal record. It listed action games, board games, sports games and chase games, for a box that might sell for about $25 and play through channel 3 or 4. Baer called it “Channel LP”, for “Let’s Play!”.
Sanders funded the work from its research budget. The technician Bill Harrison, brought in early in 1967, designed and built much of the circuitry. The engineer Bill Rusch joined in August 1967, and the team added a third spot to the screen, moved by the machine rather than by a player. Rusch’s idea was to use it as a ball. Ping-pong, tennis, hockey and handball followed on paper within weeks. The team also made a light gun from a plastic rifle bought at Sears; the light gun entry follows what became of it.
TV Game Unit #7 was working by early 1968. Harrison covered its chassis in brown, self-adhesive wood-grain vinyl, and it became known as the Brown Box. Its games were chosen with two rows of switches; cards slipped between them showed which switches to set.
The Odyssey
Sanders was a defence company and had no way to sell a toy. Baer and Sanders’s patent counsel, Lou Etlinger, offered the Brown Box to television makers. RCA, Zenith, Sylvania, GE, Motorola and Magnavox all came to see it in 1969. A Sears buyer turned it down, saying mothers would drop their children off at his stores on Saturday mornings to be babysat by it. Magnavox signed a preliminary agreement in January 1971. Its engineers kept most of the Brown Box circuits, dropped the colour backgrounds to save money, and replaced the switches with plug-in circuit cards. Baer thought the cards “a stroke of genius”. Inside, he told Video Games, there were about 40 transistors and “a pile of diodes”, with plastic overlays on the screen to supply the scenery the circuits could not draw.
The Odyssey went on show to Magnavox dealers in May 1972. On 24 May, at Burlingame in California, Nolan Bushnell played its ping-pong game; the Pong entry tells what came of that. About 100,000 Odysseys sold in 1972, at $100, with the rifle another $25. Baer blamed Magnavox for the rest: in both his 1983 interview and his book he said it sold the Odyssey only through its own dealers, let its advertising suggest that the console worked only with Magnavox televisions, left the extra game packs unsold under shop counters, and stopped promoting it after the first year. In his book he put total production of the original model, through 1975, at some 350,000.
The patents in court
The patents from Baer, Harrison and Rusch’s work, owned by Sanders and licensed to Magnavox, covered the basic idea of games played with symbols on a television screen. Magnavox took the coin-op makers to court in Chicago in 1976, before Judge John Grady. In Baer’s account, Atari settled on 6 June 1976, taking a paid-up licence, while the case against the other makers went on. Judge Grady ruled for Magnavox in January 1977, and Baer quoted the official record calling his ’480 patent “the pioneering patent of the videogame art”. Video Games reported in 1984 that the Sanders patents had always been upheld; in 1983 Baer told the magazine that one of them alone was worth “many, many millions of dollars” to Sanders.
The cases ran for two decades, against Mattel, Activision and others. Baer wrote that Nintendo, facing a Magnavox infringement claim in 1986, sued him and Magnavox’s lawyers for misleading the Patent Office, and that the judge threw the suit out; he wrote that Nintendo later settled, and that he had seen a document showing a payment of $10 million. The last of the lawsuits, he said, ended in 1998.
Baer did not own the patents, and for years he did not get the fame. Asked in 1983 whether it bothered him that Bushnell was credited with inventing video games, he answered: “Sure it bothers me.” But he said Bushnell “was the major catalyst in developing the industry. He deserves credit for that. I’d just like to see myself more often identified as the inventor.”
Simon
By the mid-1970s Baer was also designing electronic toys with Marvin Glass & Associates, the Chicago toy design firm. In 1976 he and Howard Morrison, one of its partners, played Atari’s coin-op Touch Me at a trade show, in which the player copied a sequence of lit buttons. They liked the idea and disliked the machine, in Baer’s words “visually boring” with “miserable, rasping sounds”. Their handheld version ran on a Texas Instruments TMS1000 chip, programmed by Baer’s colleague Lenny Cope. Baer picked its four notes from the bugle, so that any sequence of them would sound pleasant.
Milton Bradley bought it, named it Simon, and launched it in 1978 with a midnight party at Studio 54 in New York. Baer’s book gives the year of introduction as 1979; the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which holds a Simon given by Baer, dates it to 1978. He filed the patent in 1977, and cited Touch Me’s manual in it.
Later years
Baer left Sanders in 1988, at 66, and worked on toys and games as a consultant. In 1999 he took the Brown Box, still working, to the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas and played ping-pong on it with the audience. He gave it and other early units to the Smithsonian, built working replicas of the rest, and in 2005 published his own account, Videogames: In the Beginning, drawing on the logs and notes he had kept since 1966. By then his biography credited him with more than 150 US and foreign patents.
On 13 February 2006 President George W. Bush presented him with the National Medal of Technology “for his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games”. He died at home in Manchester, New Hampshire, on 6 December 2014, aged 92.
Sources
- Ralph H. Baer, Videogames: In the Beginning (Rolenta Press, 2005): “In The Beginning”, the book’s opening chapter (Army service, the 1948 degree, the Loral television set); “Life at Sanders” and “September 6, 1966 – Genesis!”, pp. 18–27 (Loral in 1951, the bus terminal, the disclosure of 1 September 1966, Bob Solomon, “Channel LP”, 500 staff, forty million TV sets); “November 1967: Ping-Pong Games Are Here!”, pp. 30–45 (Harrison from February 1967; Rusch from 18 August 1967; the third spot as a ball); “Back on Track” and “The Brown Box Makes Its Debut”, pp. 52–56 (the Sears rifle, the vinyl, the switches and cards); “Calling All TV Set Manufacturers!” to “Making A Maximum Effort In Ft. Wayne”, pp. 56–61 (the manufacturers’ visits in 1969, the Sears buyer, the agreement of January 1971, Magnavox’s changes, “a stroke of genius”); “Odyssey Makes Its Entrance!” and “The Birth Of Pong”, pp. 75–76 (the May 1972 tour, the prices, the advertising, about 100,000 sold, 350,000 produced, Bushnell at Burlingame on 24 May); “1976 – The Lawsuits Start”, pp. 126ff (Judge Grady, the ruling of January 1977, the ’480 “pioneering patent”, Atari’s settlement of 6 June 1976, the last lawsuits in 1998); “The Nintendo Lawsuit Interlude”, p. 159; “1988 – Leaving Sanders”; “Appendix One: From Touch-Me to Simon”, pp. 171–173; author’s biography (more than 150 patents).
- Steve Bloom, interview with Ralph Baer, Video Games, vol. 1 no. 5, February 1983, pp. 20–24 and 80–81: the family’s arrival from Germany in 1938 and his expulsion from school; military intelligence, the GI Bill and his degree; Sanders from 1959; 40 transistors and a pile of diodes; about 100,000 Odysseys in 1972; Magnavox’s “four serious mistakes”; the patent worth “many, many millions of dollars”; Baer on Bushnell and credit.
- Frank Lovece, “The Birth of a Notion”, Video Games, vol. 2 no. 4, January 1984, pp. 40–43: the Sanders patents always upheld.
- “Simon Electronic Game, 1978”, National Museum of American History (web, secondary): the 1978 launch at Studio 54; Baer and Morrison seeing Touch Me in 1976; the object given by Baer. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_1302005
- White House photograph caption, 13 February 2006 (web, secondary): the National Medal of Technology and its citation. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/02/images/text/20060213_d-0217-515h.html
- “Ralph H. Baer”, National Science and Technology Medals Foundation (web, secondary): date of birth; the medal, in the 2004 class of laureates. https://nationalmedals.org/laureate/ralph-h-baer/
- “Video Game Consoles Pioneer Ralph Baer Dies at 92”, NBC News (Associated Press), 8 December 2014 (web, secondary). https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna263911
- “Ralph H. Baer”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): date and place of death; the name of his Chicago college. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_H._Baer