9
1TL200
On September 7, 1927, a largely self-taught electrical engineer from Idaho named Philo T. Farnsworth stood in front of a screen in San Francisco, California, upon which a small line appeared. Farnsworth called out to an assistant in the next room to rotate a slide containing an image of a triangle, and the line changed position as he did so. The slide sat in front of a special vacuum tube called an image dissector that transformed the light passing through it into an electromagnetic wave that was transmitted to the screen in the other room. While the resulting image failed to depict the entire triangle, this experiment represented the first demonstration of a fully electronic television.1
Farnsworth was not the first person to dabble in television. Indeed, he was not even the first to demonstrate a working system, but earlier efforts at places like Bell Labs and General Electric had been mechanical, based around a spinning disk design first invented by German university student Paul Nipkow in 1884. Farnsworth, on the other hand, had been keeping close tabs on developments in physics research since he was a teenager working on the family farm and figured the only way to generate an image with sufficient sharpness and clarity would be to manipulate it on the subatomic level through the use of a cathode-ray tube (CRT), a special type of vacuum tube invented by German Physicist Karl Braun in 1897 in which a stream of electrons passes through an evacuated glass cylinder and strikes a phosphor-coated screen to generate a point of light. By regulating the voltages of a magnetic field, Farnsworth theorized, this beam could be pointed at different spots on the screen in rapid succession, thus allowing it to draw a complete picture in the barest fraction of a second. Combined with existing broadcasting technologies, this would theoretically allow a picture to be converted into a wave, broadcast into a home, and then converted back into an image again by the CRT.2 Farnsworth’s September 1927 demonstration proved that he was correct. The race was now on to bring the first television to market.
Farnsworth’s most serious competition would come from the corporate powerhouse RCA, a wireless company established in 1919 by General Electric. Although founded to monopolize wireless communication in the United States after the medium had proven so crucial in World War I, RCA shifted its focus in the 1920s through the efforts of its commercial manager David Sarnoff, who was convinced that the future of wireless technology was not telegraphy, but the broadcasting of entertainment content that could be picked up by radio sets owned by the general public. Sarnoff was not the first person to hit upon this idea, but he was the first to enjoy the backing of one of the largest electrical companies in the world. Sarnoff convinced his superiors at RCA to acquire all the significant wireless patents it did not already own from AT&T and Westinghouse in exchange for RCA stock, giving the company a monopoly on radio technology.3 When demand for radio sets took off in the early 1920s after a series of high-profile broadcasts of sporting and other public events, RCA dominated this new trade, first as the sole authorized manufacturer of radio sets and then by licensing its patents to other companies.4
Meanwhile, in September 1928 Philo Farnsworth demonstrated his television publicly for the first time, sparking the first media coverage of the new technology. Three months later, a researcher from Westinghouse named Vladimir Zworykin approached Sarnoff. Like Farnsworth, Zworykin had been inspired by science journals in the early 1920s to pursue an electronic television solution and had even attempted to patent a system in 1923, but failed because he proved unable to demonstrate his method. His work had to proceed in a clandestine manner, however, as it was not officially sanctioned by his employer. Zworykin came to Sarnoff came to Sarnoff in the hopes that RCA would back his research. Sarnoff immediately took to his proposal and arranged for him to come work for RCA.5
In 1930, Sarnoff was rewarded for his domination of the radio business with a promotion to president of RCA, but this period of greatest success also turned into his greatest period of struggle. The Depression was now in full swing, and radio sales were collapsing. Worse, the generally pro-business administration of President Herbert Hoover was taking such a beating for failing to prevent the economic calamity that it launched an anti-trust suit against RCA for its dominance of the radio business in an effort to mollify its critics. In the midst of these struggles, however, Sarnoff managed to establish a new centralized R&D operation in Camden, New Jersey, where Zworykin and a team of engineers toiled away trying to create a viable commercial television system that Sarnoff believed would be the future of broadcast entertainment.6
After years of research, RCA finally demonstrated its system in 1936, but it compared poorly to the system Farnsworth had developed concurrently. Zworykin’s team decided they would need to copy elements of Farnsworth’s system, but this technology had been patented. Sarnoff attempted to have these patents invalidated, but failed. In September 1939, Sarnoff was forced to concede defeat and license Farnsworth’s patents to head off a potential infringement suit.7
In April 1939, RCA publicly debuted its first commercially available television sets at the World’s Fair in New York City and began a series of experimental broadcasts. With commercial television now a reality, the Federal Communications Commission began holding hearings in the summer of 1940 to standardize the television broadcasting format. This resulted in the promulgation of the NTSC standard in 1941 that, with some modification, remained the standard in the United States for over 70 years.8 World War II interrupted television research and manufacturing, but the need for radar displays during the war led to rapid technological developments that greatly decreased the cost of manufacturing sets at its conclusion. As the United States experienced a new period of prosperity in the 1950s, the entire country embraced television entertainment, and the percentage of households owning a television increased from just 0.6% of the population in 1946 to roughly 90% by the end of the 1950s. RCA continued to dominate the business, particularly after the sales of color televisions, for which RCA promulgated what became the broadcast standard, exploded in the 1960s.9
To most people, the television was merely an extension of the existing radio business with a sole purpose of receiving information broadcast by a station so as to provide a passive form of entertainment. Consequently, none of the major television manufacturers looked to transform the television into an interactive form of entertainment. Indeed, in the 40 years after Philo Farnsworth filed the first television patents in 1927, the only patent for anything approaching a television game was issued on December 14, 1948, for a device called a “Cathode-ray tube amusement device.” This patent was filed almost two years earlier by engineers working for the DuMont Laboratory in Passaic, New Jersey.
Inventor Allen DuMont first became interested in television when he went to work for Lee De Forest in 1928 and first made his mark by inventing a longer lasting CRT tube in 1930 that helped make practical electronic television possible. He established DuMont Laboratory the next year to specialize in oscilloscopes, but he also introduced one of the first fully electric television sets in 1938 and established the second television network in the United States, the DuMont Network, in 1946 to promote the sale of his televisions.10
As a specialist in CRT technology, DuMont was always on the lookout for new applications for its equipment. These R&D efforts were overseen by Thomas Goldsmith, Jr., who became DuMont’s research director in 1936 after receiving his PhD from Cornell. It was Goldsmith, along with a fellow engineer named Estle Ray Mann, who filed the CRT amusement device patent in January 1947, the first known instance of anyone proposing to use a CRT to play a game. Consisting of just a few resistors, a sawtooth generator, and a CRT, Goldsmith and Mann’s game simulated firing a missile at a target, perhaps taking inspiration from Goldsmith’s radar research during World War II. Using a knob, the player would guide the electron beam generated by the CRT across a screen to a target. After a certain period of time elapsed, which was adjustable by the player, the beam would defocus to simulate an explosion. If the beam defocused while on the target, it counted as a hit.11 Despite filing the patent, however, DuMont never actually built the game. The reason for this is not clear, though DuMont was always strapped for cash during this period, so the company may have simply not had the resources to invest in a new commercial product.
Some have been tempted to label this “cathode-ray tube amusement device” as the first video game, but the device fits no definition of the term. There is no video signal, no computer, no software program, and only the simplest of electronics. There are also no graphics beyond the arc of the missile, as the targets for the system consisted of physical objects affixed to a screen. Basically, the exact same effect could have been created by mechanically controlling a flashlight shining its beam on a piece of paper. Therefore, while Goldsmith and Mann’s work proved pioneering, the honor of inventing and patenting the first video game remains with Ralph Baer and his bus terminal brainstorm in the summer of 1966.
***
Rudolf Heinrich “Ralph” Baer was born on March 8, 1922, in Pirmasens, Germany. His father, a Jewish World War I veteran named Leo, ran a leather tannery supplying the many shoe factories in town, but due to the depressed economic conditions in the region after World War I, the family moved to Cologne two years after Ralph was born. As a German of Jewish descent, Ralph was subjected to increasingly anti-Semitic practices after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and was expelled from school at the age of 14. He subsequently attempted to secure a job as a plumber’s apprentice but was not “Aryan enough” for his potential employer, so he ended up working in an office instead, where he learned shorthand and typing and performed filing and bookkeeping tasks.12
In 1938, the Baer family emigrated to the United States just ahead of Kristallnacht and settled in the Bronx, where Ralph worked in a factory owned by a cousin earning $12 a week putting buttons on cosmetic cases until he saw an ad on the back of a magazine for the National Radio Institute and enrolled in a correspondence course in radio servicing. Upon completing the course, Ralph took a job with a radio store on Lexington Avenue handling all pickup, delivery, and servicing for the company.
In 1943, Baer was drafted into the U.S. Army as a combat engineer. Shipped overseas as part of the buildup for the Normandy landings, Baer contracted pneumonia in England and was spared going ashore on D-Day. Afterwards, he became part of a special military intelligence unit attached to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s headquarters that gave courses in identifying enemy uniforms, interrogating enemy soldiers, and identifying and handling enemy weapons.
In March 1946, Ralph Baer received his discharge from the Army, returned to New York, and secured a job fixing faulty radios for a manufacturer called Emerson. Bored after three months, Baer quit and explored avenues for continuing his education. Turned down by all the New York colleges because he had no record of his education in Germany, Baer saw an ad for a small unaccredited school in Chicago called the American Television Institute of Technology (ATIT) and enrolled in late 1946 through the GI Bill. By the time he graduated in 1949, the school had received accreditation, so Baer walked away with one of the first BS degrees in television engineering. Upon graduating from ATIT, Baer secured employment at a small medical equipment firm called Wappler Inc., but he felt the work lacked sufficient challenge and departed two years later to take a job at the defense contractor Loral Corporation. It was at Loral that Baer first suggested adding a game to a television set in 1951, but his idea was turned down.13
When the Loral television project ultimately stalled, Baer left the company to work for a defense contractor named Transitron.14 In 1955, Transitron became a subsidiary of Van Norman Industries and moved to New Hampshire, which would remain Baer’s home for the rest of his life. When the company hit hard times three years later, Baer left to work for another defense contractor called Sanders Associates. Specializing in electronic warfare systems, Sanders was founded in 1951 by a group of engineers led by Roydon Sanders. An electronics genius, Sanders invented the first FM Altimeter while still a college student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the 1930s, worked for RCA during World War II, and ran Raytheon’s Lab 16 in the late 1940s, where his team developed the first guided missiles.15 By 1958, his company employed 8,000 people and enjoyed sales of $9 million a year.16
Sanders assigned Baer to its Equipment Design Division, where he worked primarily on a spying apparatus codenamed BRANDY designed to pick up Soviet radio transmissions in Berlin. Soon after Baer completed the project ahead of schedule, the division manager retired, so in 1966 Baer was promoted to lead the unit. It was in this context that Baer found himself sitting outside that New York City bus terminal on August 31, 1966, dreaming up the first video game.17
On September 1, 1966, Baer drafted his four-page memo outlining his ideas for a “TV Gaming Display” that would transmit a video signal to a television through its antenna ports and incorporate an RF modulator oscillating at one of the standard TV channel frequencies so that the television could tune to the signal and display the game. He also outlined several types of games he felt would be well suited for his system such as driving games with a steering wheel controller, card games, board games like checkers and chess, basic educational software like arithmetic and geometry programs, games of chance like dice and roulette, target shooting games, and a “pumping” game in which each player presses a button rapidly to fill a vessel. On September 6, Baer drew up a rough schematic of how the device might work and specified channels 3 and 4 for its video signal, which remained the standard right up until plugging a video game console into a television no longer required an RF modulator in the 1990s.18
Soon after drafting these documents, Baer initiated a skunk works project to build a prototype of his new game system. While Baer could never sanction a game system as an official company project, his Equipment Design Division carried a staff of 500 people, so no one would notice or even care if Baer took an engineer or two aside and put them to work on a special project in between more important work. Therefore, he asked one of his department managers to lend him a technician to create a feasibility prototype of his TV game using vacuum tubes. The manager loaned him a man named Bob Tremblay, who in December 1966 completed the circuitry necessary to interface a Heathkit TV alignment generator with a television via an RF modulator and move a vertical line around the screen. With this feasibility prototype in hand, Baer approached the Sanders Corporate Director of Research & Development, Herbert Campman, to officially sanction the project. After viewing Baer’s line-moving system in action, Campman approved further development with a modest initial budget of $2,000 for labor and $500 for materials. Sanders was now officially in the video game business.19
On February 12, 1967, Baer formally started work on his game system by recruiting a technician named Bill Harrison. Born in Sagamore, Massachusetts, in 1935, William L. Harrison left home in 1953 at the age of 18 to join the U.S. Air Force, where he was assigned to an electronics course at Kessler Field in Mississippi so he could be trained as a ground radar repairman. After completing his tour of duty in 1957, Harrison joined Sanders Associates, where his cousin was married to one of the founders, and by 1967 he was part of the Ocean Systems Division working on a sonar buoy project. He had previously worked briefly with Baer on the BRANDY project, however, who was both impressed by his reliability and knew he had some television experience from tinkering with sets in his spare time. Therefore, Baer called one day to invite him to see his TV game prototype and to recruit him for the project. With Harrison on board, work soon commenced on the first real system prototype.20
Although now an official project, Baer’s video game was still a highly unusual endeavor for a defense contractor to undertake, so he decided to keep the work low key by stashing Harrison in a small room on the fifth floor of the main Sanders building on Canal Street that remained locked at all times and for which only Baer and Harrison had a key. Unfortunately, Harrison had barely started development on his first prototype when he was called away for three months to work on a more important project.21 During this lull, Baer brainstormed more game ideas with the manager of Advanced Techniques Programs within the Sanders Corporate Research and Development Department, Bill Rusch, a 1953 MIT graduate in electrical engineering who joined Sanders in 1957 after serving a tour of duty with the U.S. Army.22 On May 10, 1967, Rusch drafted a formal memo articulating multiple game types that emerged from these brainstorming sessions, including a drawing game, two driving games set on an endless road and a circular track, a chase game, a maze game, a roulette game, several variations on a baseball guessing game in which the screen was divided into horizontal bands and the “batter” would guess in which band the “pitcher” will throw the ball, a U.S. geography map game, two target shooting games, a number guessing game, a “fox and hounds” game in which multiple pursuers chase one target, a soccer game, a golf putting game, and a horse racing game.23
Meanwhile, Harrison returned to the project on May 2 and implemented the pumping game outlined in Baer’s first memo. In this game, the first playable on Baer’s hardware, one player would furiously press a button to raise a blue square on the screen that represented water, while the other player would pound his button to lower the square. An overlay placed on top of the screen contained a drawing of the “bucket” that held the “water.” If the first player could fill the bucket high enough within a time limit, he won, otherwise, the water turned red and the other player won the contest. Subsequently, Baer directed Harrison to implement four additional games, all of which required only one spot since that was all the hardware could produce. These were a second pumping game called Firefighters, Color Catching, Roulette, and Car Ride.24 Once these were completed, Harrison built a few more components that allowed the team to retire the Heathkit equipment from the initial prototype.25
Once the duo had the full system up and running, Baer designed the necessary hardware to add a second dot on the screen, which Harrison implemented starting on May 22. This allowed two players to each control their own dots and led to the design of the “chase” game outlined in the Rusch memo in which one dot attempted to catch the other. This required two new features in the hardware: collision detection and the ability to make a dot disappear. Both of these functions were sketched out by Baer and then implemented by Harrison on May 25.26 Harrison also built a light gun around this time by buying a toy gun from Sears and retrofitting it so that it could sense dots on the screen and cause them to disappear with a pull of the trigger.27
On June 14, 1967, Baer invited Campman back to the lab for a demonstration of the system. Though impressed by all the games, Campman particularly liked the light gun game and believed Baer now had a winning product. He, therefore, approved additional R&D funding and indicated it was time to bring senior management into the loop. The next day, Baer demonstrated the system for Royden Sanders, executive VP Harold Pope, and the entire board of directors of Sanders, who happened to be in town for a meeting. Seven games were shown: a chase game on a grid of squares called Chess, a freeform chase game called Steeple Chase, a chase game called Fox and Hounds that used random dot generation hardware to place multiple pursuers on the screen, Target Shooting with the light gun, a guessing game called Color Wheel Game, and the two previously implemented pumping games under the names Bucket Filling Game and Pumping Game. While neither Sanders nor Pope nor all but two of the company directors were particularly impressed, Sanders and Pope conferred briefly at the end of the demonstration before formally authorizing the project with the goal of creating a commercial product that Sanders could sell itself or license to another company.28
In the aftermath of the successful demonstration of his system, Baer began refining it into a viable commercial product. His target retail price was just $25.00, so to reduce the part count he refocused the system around the best ideas he and Harrison had developed. Harrison removed the pumping game mechanic, which had never been particularly fun, as well as the circuits that allowed for color graphics and the placement of additional dots on the screen through a random number generator. By August 1967, Harrison had completed his scaled-down version of the system, which now only played chase and shooting games. Unfortunately, despite cutting as many corners as they possibly could, Baer and Harrison were unable to come near their target price: the system they built would have to sell for a minimum of $50.00 at retail. Baer felt his simple chase and light gun games did not provide nearly enough entertainment value to justify that price, so he put the color circuitry back into the system and tried to develop additional game concepts. When he proved unable to make the system more interesting, Campman loaned Baer his former brainstorming partner Bill Rusch. On August 18, 1967, Rusch became the third member of the Sanders TV game team.29
Bill Rusch, described at various times as “very different” and “a colorful character,” clashed with the straight-laced Baer and infuriated him by repeatedly showing up late for work, goofing off for an hour before turning to the task at hand, taking two-hour lunches, and generally spending as little time actually working as possible. Before long, Baer was so desperate to motivate his frustrating engineer that he let him work on a pet project involving changing the octave of notes played on a guitar in addition to the TV game project. Despite these difficulties, however, there was no doubting Rusch’s intelligence or creativity, which is why Baer ultimately kept him around despite the headaches. Indeed, soon after joining the team Rusch proved his value by proposing the idea that saved the entire project: adding a third, machine-controlled dot to serve as a ball for use in a game of ping pong. By November 1967, Baer’s team had a video game unit that could play ping pong, chase, and shooting games with three controllers: a light gun for target shooting, joysticks for the chase game, and a three dial control for ping pong that controlled the horizontal and vertical movement of the player’s paddle and allowed the player to manipulate the ball to put a little “English” on it. After another demo for Campman, the R&D director concurred with Baer that the system finally contained enough interesting gameplay variants to be worth selling, so Baer focused on finding a retail partner.30
Baer turned first to the fledgling cable industry. At the time, there were no dedicated cable channels, so cable TV was basically just an expensive way to receive the exact same channels that a person could already tune for free over the air. Unless a person lived in the mountains or in a similar environment where reception was exceptionally poor, it was hard for a consumer to justify the cost. As a result, the cable industry was struggling, and Baer felt that a novel product like a TV game could be just the thing for the industry to break out of its slump. He directed Harrison to modify the game to accept background graphics transmitted by a cable signal and contacted the largest cable provider, TelePrompter, which supplied roughly 60,000 subscribers. The idea was that the cable company could point a camera at a highly detailed view of a tennis court or some other venue which would be broadcast to the TV game to provide a background for the action. The spots generated by the hardware would then be superimposed on top. TelePrompter expressed interest, and negotiations proceeded on and off between January and April 1968. While the cable company thought the game a good idea, an economic recession left it in an untenable financial situation, and it could not afford to develop the product. Baer would need to find another partner.31
***
In December 1967 and January 1968, Harrison continued to work on improving the TV game and added two new ball-and-paddle variants, handball and volleyball.32 At that point, funding for the project dried up. The same recession affecting TelePromper also hit Sanders hard, and the company scaled down from 11,000 employees to just 4,000 during this period. This also marked the end of Bill Rusch’s short, but productive time on the project.
In September 1968, Baer secured additional funding and brought Harrison back to create another prototype that featured a rotary dial to select different game modes rather than switches as in previous versions. Still feeling they could do a little better, Baer and Harrison developed one final prototype in January 1969 that they called the “Brown Box” because Harrison wrapped the casing in self-adhesive woodgrain to make it more attractive.33 This version included an expanded set of games, with hockey, soccer, and football joining the ping-pong, handball, volleyball, target shooting, and chase games found in previous versions.34
By the end of 1968, Baer and Harrison had essentially finished the Brown Box, but they were no closer to selling it. The Sanders patent attorney, Lou Etlinger, provided the solution: approach the television manufacturers. These firms were already using the components contained within the Brown Box in their TV sets, so ramping up manufacturing would be relatively simple. Additionally, the TV companies would most likely be interested in anything that could spur television sales. One by one, Etlinger invited some of the most prominent U.S. TV manufacturers – RCA, Zenith, Sylvania, General Electric, Motorola, Sears-brand manufacturer Warwick, and Magnavox – to view the Brown Box in action. While many of these companies showed some interest, Baer and Etlinger were never able to close a deal. Warwick was impressed and told Sanders to contact the buyer at Sears, but the executive refused to sell the product in his stores because he feared parents would drop their kids off in the electronics department to play the games and transform Sears into a glorified babysitter. The General Electric engineers were likewise impressed and helped set up a meeting at the company’s small-color-set assembly facility in Virginia, but nothing ever came of it.35
The first company to view the system, RCA, ultimately proved the most enthusiastic. After attending a demonstration of Baer’s technology in Nashua, New Hampshire, in January 1969, the company liked the system so much that it started negotiating a licensing agreement with Sanders in the spring. An agreement was hammered out after several months of negotiations, but Sanders backed out of the deal after deciding the terms were unacceptable. Baer appeared out of options at this point, but luckily one of the RCA negotiators, Bill Enders, remained highly enthusiastic about the product. When Enders left RCA to become the director of business development operations at Magnavox, he urged his new employer to take another look at the system.36
***
The Magnavox Corporation originated as a partnership established in Napa, California, on March 1, 1911, called the Commercial Wireless and Development Company that brought together three individuals: Danish electrical engineer Peter Jensen, Stanford-trained electrical engineer Edwin Pridham, and San Francisco financier Richard O’Connor.37 Jensen was initially interested in developing new technologies for wireless and telephonic communication, but ultimately developed the first loudspeaker public address system instead, which he demonstrated for the first time on December 10, 1915, in San Francisco. Jensen called his system the “Magnavox,” “great voice” in Latin, which became the name of the entire company after it merged with the Sonora Phonograph Distribution Company in July 1917.38
Magnavox focused on loudspeaker systems initially, but after AT&T came to dominate the field in the 1920s, the company transitioned into the phonograph and radio business. Magnavox consolidated its various facilities at a new headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1930 before nearly falling apart during the Great Depression.39 The firm narrowly avoided bankruptcy only through the onset of World War II and the lucrative government contracts that followed.40 In 1950, Hungarian émigré Frank Freimann became CEO of the company and aggressively pushed it into the television business, leading to a more than ten-fold increase in sales between 1950 and 1967 from $32 million to $450 million.41 Freiman’s sudden death in 1968 left the company adrift just as component stereo equipment and small Japanese televisions began severely cutting into the sales of Magnavox’s traditional console stereos and televisions housed in large wooden cabinets. New company president Robert Platt began an aggressive diversification program to keep the company relevant, so Magnavox was constantly on the lookout for new business avenues as the 1960s came to a close.
In July 1969, Bill Enders returned to Nashua for a personal demonstration of the Brown Box. Still impressed with the technology, he began heavily lobbying his superiors to license it. This campaign culminated in a demonstration of the technology at Magnavox headquarters in Fort Wayne on July 17, 1969, for Gerry Martin, the VP of the Magnavox Console Products Planning Division. Martin liked the technology, but it took him months of lobbying with Magnavox corporate before he was finally authorized to negotiate a deal in March 1970. Nearly a year of negotiations followed, culminating in a preliminary licensing agreement between Sanders and Magnavox in January 1971.42
With a license agreement in place, further development of the Brown Box – known within Magnavox by the product designation 1TL200 – shifted from Baer’s lab at Sanders to a team of Magnavox engineers in Fort Wayne led by George Kent. While Baer and Harrison consulted with these engineers from time to time, their active role in the development of the video game was now over. Magnavox management placed an emphasis on reducing the cost of the system, so Kent’s team removed the chroma circuitry for generating color backgrounds.43 They also chose to move away from switches or dials to select games by including a group of plug-in circuit cards that determined how the spots and lines generated by the system would behave to facilitate a variety of games.44
Magnavox originally placed the video game project under the supervision of Bob Wiles, the product manager for color televisions. In late 1971, the system was placed in its own category under a product manager named Bob Fritsche. A 1966 graduate of Miami University of Ohio with a degree in marketing, Fritsche joined the U.S. Air Force right out of college, mustered out in October 1970 at the rank of captain, and subsequently joined Magnavox in the purchasing department. In September 1971, he became the product planner on the Magnavox video game system.45
When Fritsche took over the project, Magnavox had just begun performing consumer playtest and marketing surveys using prototype hardware of what was now being called “Skill-O-Vision.” The first, conducted in Los Angeles, proved successful, so a second survey was scheduled for Grand Rapids, Michigan, to gauge the response in a more technologically conservative part of the country. When this test also proved a resounding success, Fritsche successfully lobbied his superiors to ignore the original market projections calling for a limited production runs of 50,000 units for the first holiday season and build 100,000 units instead. In order to ensure Magnavox dealers across the country would have sufficient stock to meet market demand, the company decided to release the video game system in only 18 major markets, one metropolitan area in each of its 18 sales territories nationwide.46
The final version of the Magnavox video game system, now dubbed the Odyssey – a name whose origin has been lost to time – was unveiled to the company’s authorized dealers in May 1972 in Las Vegas. The product was subsequently publicly unveiled at a press event hosted at Tavern on the Green in New York City on May 22. Over the next few months, Magnavox hosted shows in roughly 16 cities to allow its dealers and other interested industry parties to familiarize themselves with the product ahead of the general retail availability of the console in the fall.47
***
The Magnavox Odyssey hit store shelves in September 1972 at a suggested retail price of $99.95, roughly double what Baer had originally planned. The system shipped with 12 games unlocked by six circuit cards, which all centered on moving dots around the screen since the Odyssey remained capable of generating only two player-controlled dots plus one machine-controlled dot and a single line of varying height.48 Each game required a plastic overlay to define additional graphical elements, which clung to the TV screen through static electricity.49 The system also shipped with cards, play money, and dice to provide additional game mechanics. Despite the multiple control schemes Baer and Harrison produced, the final product shipped with only one, the three-dial control, which also incorporated a reset button that caused the dot to disappear or reappear. The overlays and packaging materials were designed by Ron Bradford of Bradford/Cout Design, which had previously done creative work for Magnavox’s advertising agency. Bradford also designed the games for the system in conjunction with adman Steve Lehner, which were largely based on the ball and paddle and chase games developed by Baer, Harrison, and Rusch at Sanders.50
While the capabilities of the Odyssey were limited, Bradford and Lehner did what they could to provide a variety of game experiences. These included Tennis, Table Tennis, and Hockey games in which the players knock a ball back and forth between their dots; Ski, in which the player guides his dot along a path on an overlay; Cat and Mouse, in which one player pursues the other; Submarine, in which one player launches the machine-controlled dot at a player-controlled dot navigating a “shipping” lane represented on an overlay; and a complicated Football game that uses dice and “play cards” to simulate the overall game and uses two different circuit cards to simulate individual running, passing, and kicking plays. The other games were Simon Says, Analogic, Haunted House, Roulette, and a trivia game called States.
Six additional games were available individually for $5.95 each or in a six pack for $24.99. These were two ball-and-paddle games, Handball and Volleyball, two racing games, Fun Zoo and Wipeout, and a complex strategy game called Invasion that requires the players to track their progress on a separate game board. Most of these games use the six circuit cards that shipped with the system, but Volleyball and Handball were packaged with new cards. The light gun was sold separately for $24.99 with two circuit cards to play four target shooting games, Prehistoric Safari, Dogfight!, Shootout!, and Shooting Gallery.51
The Odyssey initially launched in 25 markets, seven more than originally planned after Magnavox expended considerable effort to increase production capacity and build additional systems based on the favorable feedback gathered during the marketing surveys. Rather than making these systems available to retailers generally, distribution was restricted to the Magnavox network of dealers who sold the company’s products exclusively, a decision made by a senior marketing VP who felt that as the world’s first video game system, the Odyssey would draw customers to Magnavox dealers and therefore present an opportunity to sell them a full range of Magnavox products.52 To support the launch of the system, Magnavox produced a national advertising campaign featuring glossy sales flyers, in-store displays, national television and radio ads, and promotional tie-ins such as a product demonstration on the game show What’s My Line? Initial results were positive as many dealers sold out their first shipments nearly instantaneously, so Magnavox increased production still further.53 Sales soon stalled, however, and the company only sold 69,000 Odyssey consoles by the end of the year out of a production run of roughly 140,000 units.54 Tens of thousands of unsold systems were left piled in a warehouse.55
Why did the system sell so poorly despite the initially positive marketing research? While impossible to say for certain, a number of factors can be identified. Certainly price had to be a major factor, as $100, equivalent to roughly $570 today, represented a significant investment in a new and unproven technology that offered relatively limited gameplay. Limiting distribution to Magnavox dealers probably also hurt, as this not only curtailed the reach of the product but also may have left consumers with the mistaken impression that the system only worked with Magnavox televisions. The initial television ads did little to dispel this confusion by showing the Odyssey hooked up to a Magnavox set. Starting in early 1973, Odyssey ads and commercials went to great pains to inform the public that the system would work with any 18ʺ or 25ʺ television, but by then the damage may have already been done. Furthermore, it is also likely that individual dealers failed to disclose the system’s universal compatibility in their desire to sell an Odyssey system alongside a new television. Of course, it is also worth noting that the system bettered Magnavox’s original market projections by nearly 20,000 units, so the performance of the system may have just been hampered by an overly excited product planner ordering the production of more systems than the market could bear.
With such disappointing sales, Magnavox seriously considered halting Odyssey production and liquidating the remaining stock, but the company stuck with the system based on positive customer feedback and continuing, though modest, retailer demand.56 While it remained on the market for three more years, however, the Odyssey cannot really be considered a success because sales remained low and no other companies were inspired to follow Magnavox into the home video game market. Still, the Odyssey played a crucial role in the evolution of the video game industry greatly out of proportion to its commercial success after Nolan Bushnell and his cohorts at Syzygy Engineering built on Ralph Baer’s concepts to create the first hit video game: Pong.