The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond—The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (6 page)

In typical hacker fashion, TMRC members revised
Spacewar.
Some of these additions improved the game so much that they became integral elements. By the time
Spacewar
was finished, Russell’s simple game had an accurate map of the stars in the background and a sun with an accurate gravitational field in the foreground.

Battles took place around Edwards’s sun. The best players learned how to accelerate into the sun’s gravitational field, loop around, and catch slower opponents off guard. Hovering too close or flying into the sun meant death. Another hacker added a hyperspace button. When trapped by an opponent, players could hit the button and disappear. The risk was that you never knew where your rocket would reappear. You could reappear safely across the screen, but you were just as likely to appear too close to the sun to save your rocket.

To add a touch of realism, Russell originally made his torpedoes unpredictable. Most flew straight, but some strayed. Judging players’ reactions, he later recanted, replacing realism with dependability. His final version of the game had straight-flying torpedoes. Beyond these touches, Russell’s primary vision of an outer-space torpedo duel remained intact.

Along with creating the first computer game, the members of the TMRC invented another first in electronic entertainment. Tired of sore elbows, Alan Kotok and Bob Sanders scrounged parts from the TMRC and assembled remote controllers that could be wired into the computer. These remotes were easier to use than the PDP-1’s native controls since they had dedicated switches for every
Spacewar
function, including hyperspace buttons. This was the forerunner to the gamepad.

Though Russell’s amazing hack created a sensation throughout MIT, he never made a penny from it. PDP computers were not a consumer commodity, particularly not arcade machines. “We thought about trying to make money off it for two or three days but concluded that there wasn’t a way that it could be done,” says Russell.

Eventually, Digital Equipment began using
Spacewar
as a diagnostic program for testing equipment. In effect, PDP buyers got the game free.

Steve Russell never graduated from college. He followed a professor to Stanford University and eventually moved into the private sector. In the 1970s, he met another legendary computer wizard.

Spacewar
was the first computer game. Steve Russell made no attempt to copyright his work or to collect royalties from it. He was a hacker and had created his game to show that it could be done.

The people behind the creation of the first video game did not share the Tech Model Railroad Club’s utopian vision. Their capitalistic vision held up better in the courts of law.

The first video game was created by engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire–based defense contractor. Like many large contractors, Sanders had its share of sensitive and top-secret activities. But in 1967, some of the noises coming out of one Sanders research lab had many people wondering what was going on.

The Equipment Design Division of Sanders was led by a stern and meticulous engineer named Ralph Baer; a man with a background in radio and television design who had been with the company for more than ten years.

Baer was born in Germany eleven years before Adolph Hitler took power in 1933, and he was largely self-educated. Being Jewish, he was kicked out of school at age fourteen. Two years later, his family moved to America, where he eventually took a correspondence course in radio and television servicing from the National Radio Institute.

Baer had a knack for realizing positive results from unlucky turns of fate. After joining the army in World War II, he studied algebra while stationed in England. One day, after a long study session “in the English mud,” Baer was diagnosed with pneumonia. Three days after he entered the hospital, the rest of his platoon was sent to invade Normandy. He jokes that Algebra II saved his “collectives.”

A year after he returned from the war, Baer enrolled at the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. It was his first formal education since being denied schooling in Germany.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in television engineering, he took a job with a small defense contracting firm, turning down an offer from CBS because the salary from the defense contractor paid five dollars more per week. Baer quickly developed a solid reputation. When Sanders hired him in 1955, it was to manage a design department with a staff of 200. By 1960, the staff had expanded to 500.

Baer spent more than 30 years at Sanders. The first 15 years were dedicated to military projects. During this time, he weaned himself from vacuum tubes and began working on transistor technology and early microprocessors.

Among Ralph Baer’s best attributes as an engineer was his methodical recording of every step of the inventing process. From the moment he began fleshing out new designs, Baer recorded the entire process, dated it, and filed it away. Because of his meticulous note-keeping, he knows exactly when and where he first got the idea to make games that could be played on a television.

The first man Baer allocated to game design was Bill Harrison. Once the concepts were roughed out, Harrison, well versed in transistor-circuit engineering, did most of the implementation. Baer describes Harrison as a young, talented technician who had educated himself on the workings of television sets by assembling a Heath Kit television set.

In his younger days, Baer was extremely austere or, as he later described himself, “uptight.” Working with Harrison, he created early video games using a crude mechanism for transferring images onto the television screen. Their game designs, however, lacked entertainment value. The first toy they made was a lever that players pumped furiously to change the color of a box on a television screen from red to blue. Though Baer would later prove to be an excellent electronic toy and game designer, in the beginning his work was more about engineering than game design.

When he first presented his invention to the executive board, including the company founder Royden Sanders, most of the executives felt that Baer was wasting the company’s time. Some suggested that Baer shelve the project. Others wanted to pull the plug on it entirely.

In 1967, Baer added another member to the team—Bill Rusch, who brought a needed understanding of fun and games.

To keep Rusch productive, Baer allowed him to continue working on a project that involved playing guitar chords through a box that dropped the sounds an octave, changing the notes to the pitch of a bass guitar. With Rusch on board, the games began to take shape. Rusch made a game in which one player chases another player through a maze.

The first ones were all two-person games. Baer’s game machine was not powerful enough to control objects or run any form of artificial intelligence. In May or June of 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hard-wired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players’ dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping-pong.

Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late 1960s, downsizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn’t suddenly
go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. He nearly licensed it to a cable company, but the depressed state of the cable industry prevented the deal from ever taking shape. As a last resort, Baer urged his bosses to notify television manufacturers about the project.

He had come up with the right audience. General Electric, the first TV manufacturer to evaluate Baer’s toy, showed some interest. Then came Zenith and Sylvania. Both GE and Sylvania returned for second evaluations. RCA almost bought into the project—contracts were written but never signed.

In 1971, Magnavox hired a member of the RCA team that had nearly purchased the project. He then told other Magnavox executives about the television game he had seen at Sanders. Magnavox arranged for a demonstration of the television game and immediately saw merit in the idea. After months of the team working out details, negotiations were completed and the contract was signed by the end of the year. Production started in the fall, and early units were shown at Magnavox dealerships in 1972. Magnavox called the finished product Odyssey.