Ralph Baer and the Magnavox Odyssey

Abstract

In 1966 a television engineer at a military defense contractor wrote a four-page memo proposing that people might play games on their home TV sets. Six years later that idea shipped as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console, built with no processor and no memory: just discrete transistors, a stack of plug-in cards, and plastic sheets you taped to the screen. Its inventor, Ralph Baer, had arrived in New York in 1938 as a Jewish teenager fleeing Nazi Germany, returned to Europe as a US Army intelligence soldier, and taught himself electronics from a correspondence course. His patents on the idea of the TV game held up in court for two decades, and every early console maker, Atari included, ended up paying him. He is remembered as the father of the home video game.

From Pirmasens to New York

Ralph Baer was born Rudolf Heinrich Baer on March 8, 1922, in Pirmasens, a shoemaking town in southwestern Germany, into a Jewish family. At fourteen he was expelled from his school under Nazi racial laws and sent to an all-Jewish school. In 1938 his family emigrated to New York City, two months before Kristallnacht.

He had no high school diploma and took a factory job. He also answered a magazine advertisement and completed a correspondence course in radio and television servicing, which gave him a trade. During the Second World War he was drafted into the US Army and sent back to Europe in military intelligence, one of the Ritchie Boys, the unit of German-speaking refugees trained to interrogate prisoners. After the war he earned a bachelor’s degree in television engineering in 1949, one of the first such degrees awarded in the United States.

The Memo

By the mid-1960s Baer was a division manager at Sanders Associates, a defense electronics firm in Nashua, New Hampshire, that built systems for the military. Television sets were by then in tens of millions of American homes, and they did nothing but receive broadcasts. In September 1966 Baer wrote a memo laying out a machine that would let two people play games on the screen instead. Sanders was a military contractor with no consumer business, but his managers let him pursue it, eventually giving him a budget of $2,500 and two engineers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch.

Over 1967 and 1968 the three built a series of prototypes, ending with a unit housed in a wood-grain vinyl case they called the Brown Box. It played a ball-and-paddle chasing game, a light-gun shooting game, and several others, all generated by discrete circuitry. It contained no computer.

The Odyssey

Sanders had no way to sell a consumer product, so it licensed the design. After demonstrations to several television manufacturers, Magnavox agreed to build it in January 1971. The Magnavox Odyssey went on sale in September 1972 for $99.95.

The Odyssey worked without a microprocessor or any memory. It used diode-transistor logic built from discrete components, and the whole machine drew only a few white shapes on a black screen: a couple of square dots and a vertical center line. Games came on plug-in cards, but the cards held no program. Each was a set of jumpers that rewired the console’s circuits into a different configuration. To supply the color and backgrounds the hardware could not draw, each game shipped with a translucent plastic overlay that the player fixed over the television screen, plus dice, score sheets, and play money in the box, closer to a board game with an electronic ball than to a computer.

It sold about 69,000 units in its first year and roughly 350,000 before Magnavox discontinued it in 1975.

Misconception: The Odyssey only worked on Magnavox televisions.

The console connected to the antenna terminals of any standard set. Many buyers believed it required a Magnavox TV, an impression Magnavox’s own dealers did little to correct, since it suited them to sell both. The belief depressed sales of a machine that would in fact run on any brand. See Myths and Misconceptions.

The Patents

The Odyssey’s commercial life was modest; its legal life was long. Baer and Sanders held broad patents on the concept of generating and controlling game symbols on a television display. In May 1972, before the Odyssey reached stores, Nolan Bushnell attended a Magnavox demonstration and saw its table-tennis game; a few months later Atari released Pong (see Nolan Bushnell and Atari). Magnavox sued. Atari settled in 1976, taking a license, while later imitators fought and lost. Over about two decades of litigation, Sanders and Magnavox collected more than $100 million from the patents Baer’s memo had started.

Simon and After

Baer kept inventing. In 1978, with Howard Morrison at Milton Bradley, he co-created Simon, the disc-shaped electronic memory game with four colored lights, which became a lasting toy in its own right. He accumulated more than 150 patents over his life.

Recognition arrived late and in full. In 2006 he received the National Medal of Technology, the United States’ highest honor for technological achievement; he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010 and awarded the IEEE Edison Medal in 2014. Ralph Baer died on December 6, 2014, at ninety-two. His workshop was preserved and reassembled at the Smithsonian.

The Odyssey sold in the hundreds of thousands and vanished in three years. The idea in the 1966 memo, that the screen in every living room was a game machine waiting for a signal, became one of the largest entertainment industries on earth.