All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture

by Harold Goldberg

  In videos presented online, Tennis for Two seemed to have a bright green tinge, but perhaps because of the streaming sunlight in the new Brookhaven building, the bouncing ball now had a rich jade hue, the color of a shining emerald. Each time the ball made its way to my side of the scope, I pressed the plastic button on the old-fashioned controller and the magnets in relays clicked loudly. I was able to angle the shots by twisting a plastic knob that aimed the blip on the screen.

  Just before a few members of the press arrived, Higinbotham Junior, slightly wary but affable, stood before the game with Charlie Dvorak, the son of the lab technician who had actually made the machine full of circuits, capacitors, relays, and a mishmash of wires. Both were around fifty years old, and both had a look of pride and occasional glee as they played Tennis for Two. As they volleyed the dot, it left handsome trails on the screen and the relays clicked and clacked. Dvorak asked, “Can you imagine if your father patented this with my father? Things would be a lot different. We’d be on easy street. We’d be millionaires living in Montana somewhere.”

  Higinbotham Junior was dressed in a striped gray flannel suit with a striped tie. He, too, had worked at Brookhaven in various positions for more than eleven years. But he was somewhat of a rebel, who never went to college. In the economic downturn of 2001, Brookhaven let him go. He now worked at a Staples store on Long Island. Still playing, and without looking at Dvorak, he was pragmatic. “Nah. The government would have owned the patent. Even if he had the patent, my father would still be at Brookhaven. He would still be working here. Money wouldn’t have changed his life’s goal and that was working here and with the Federation of Scientists.”

  At lunch, Higinbotham Junior passed over a multipage document listing his father’s achievements. Nowhere on it was the game. Sitting back in his seat, he said, “My dad liked the game a lot. But in a way he cheated. He saw in the oscilloscope instructions that you could manipulate the dot on the screen. In his mind it became a tennis ball. It took just a few hours to go from point A to point B, to an interactive game.” Then he said it again. “The thing is, he didn’t want to be remembered just for the game.”

  Whatever he wanted his legacy to be, it didn’t stop Dr. Higinbotham from engineering version 2.0 of the game on a larger, seventeen-inch screen, one that added play on the moon and on Jupiter, including a fairly precise modeling of the gravitational pull of those celestial bodies.

  With its expensive germanium transistors, the game was state of the art in 1958, a time when technology was speeding forward rapidly in many industries. The world itself was infected by space fever. Sputnik went 60 million miles as it orbited Earth; the world was entranced. The Cold War had frozen relations with the USSR, and Nikita Khrushchev became its cunning, fist-pounding premier. Americans were mired in a heavy fear and paranoia about a coming nuclear war. On January 13, 9,235 scientists, led by the father of molecular biology, Linus Pauling, took out ads in newspapers, begging the United States to put a permanent halt to its nuclear testing. One of those scientists was Dr. William Higinbotham, the head of the Instrumentation Division at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Higinbotham had worked on the Manhattan Project, and like many scientists who worked on the project, he was plagued by guilt when the bomb was used on Hiroshima.

  To understand why Higinbotham made the game, you have to look into his personality. On May 18, 1958, just months before he created Tennis for Two, Parade magazine profiled Higinbotham in a three-page article entitled “A Scientist You Should Know … Wonderful Willie from Brookhaven.” Like many Parade profiles, the story was a puffy feature. But it spoke volumes about the five-foot-four, 125-pound personality who invented an electronic bombsight, one of the first digital computers, and who helped to create the Atomic Energy Commission. Not mentioned in the Parade story was that, as the chairman of the anti-bomb Federation of Scientists, Higinbotham was considered to be a communist sympathizer by paranoid, self-serving senator Joe McCarthy. Because Higinbotham had given his life to science and the government, the label haunted him.

  He forgot about any woes, though, when he was with his family. Parade said, “He’s an electronics expert who can play the accordion, call a square dance and ‘do anything with an egg.’ To his lawn mower, he would attach a sulky and to that, two red wagons to take his kids around the yard.” As much as he was a scientist, he also longed to entertain. He would lead his band, the hilariously named Isotope Stompers, down the road at Brookhaven during festivals, playing Dixieland jazz. Making the simple game was another way to let off steam. In his role of government scientist, Higinbotham was the maker of the trigger that set off the nuclear bomb. In his role as Brookhaven entertainer, he was someone who could give pleasure beyond the passive but tangible joys of listening to music. His real gift was one of interactivity. His experiment allowed people to become one with a machine. Hands on and gloves off, they competed, they won or lost, and those excited folks told other people of their newfangled adventure.

  In Higinbotham’s own unpublished notes, he lamented that at Brookhaven’s Visitors’ Days, the main exhibits were typically “picture or text displays or static instruments or components.… It occurred to me that it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance to society.” The tube on the oscilloscope was not that different from the tube on a TV, except that its screen showed patterns and not pictures. When Higinbotham opened the instruction booklet to his new computer at Brookhaven, he noted that it “described how to generate various curves … using risitors, capacitors and relays.” The booklet explained how to show bullet trajectories, wind resistance, and a bouncing ball. “Bouncing ball?” thought Higinbotham. “That sounds like fun.”

  Some of the more persnickety game fans do not consider Higinbotham’s work to be a videogame. After all, it did not use a video signal, the kind of electric impulses that became images on the old cathode-ray analog TV sets. It did not display pictures that you could recognize. It did not connect to something in the living room. To the naysayers, what Higinbotham made looked like nothing more than the display on an early heart monitor. Yet while Higinbotham’s oscilloscope didn’t technically display video, by “alternating the computer’s output with the transistor’s switching circuit,” he certainly did create what looked and played like the videogames that would become available to everyone more than a decade later. Who cares if you couldn’t display it on a TV?

  In September, the curious stood and waited for hours in long lines during Brookhaven’s ninth annual Visitors’ Days to play Tennis for Two; even though Brookhaven’s official press release made no mention of the game, word of mouth had spread quickly, almost with the speed of today’s Internet gossip. It was more than just fun. Once those lines of people played and enjoyed, it marked the beginning of videogame history.

  Higinbotham proved a few things with Tennis for Two. People enjoyed playing together while looking at a screen. As they went at it, they made the communal noises of primal togetherness that you make at a sporting event. They hooted, hollered, and laughed. They imagined they were playing on the courts. And then they went home and talked to others about this brand-new thing they had witnessed. That enthusiasm lasted when Higinbotham made version 2.0 the following year; people continued to queue up, indicating that the market for such games was already in place. Willie Higinbotham, the scientist/entertainer, had stumbled upon the future. And the future was games.

  Meanwhile, a determined but self-effacing engineer was hard at work on a game machine that would work when hooked up to a television set. His name was Ralph Baer. A few of the old-timers at Brookhaven believe that Baer took a trip there to see Tennis for Two years before he came up with the idea for a brilliant invention that would mark the videogame’s debut as a commercial enterprise.

  A SPACE ODYSSEY

  In 1966, Ralph Baer, a short, bespectacled man with a deep, radio-quality voice and a sharp wit, had been a s
uccessful engineer for thirty years, overseeing as many as five hundred employees at Sanders, a large New Hampshire manufacturer whose primary contract was with the United States Defense Department. Much of Baer’s work revolved around airborne radar and antisubmarine warfare electronics. In the late summer of that year, he was sitting on a step outside of the busy Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, waiting patiently for a colleague and about to head to Madison Avenue for a meeting with a Sanders client. Manhattan’s traffic ebbed and flowed and taxis honked and the passing parade went by. Suddenly, Baer began furiously writing notes with a number 2 pencil on a spiral-bound yellow legal pad. It was like some spirit, some videogame ghost, was doing the writing. When he was done, he had a title page and four single-spaced pages of notes. His brainstorm produced a passel of ideas for an ingenious “game box” he initially called Channel Let’s Play! In that detailed outline, he described Action Games, Board Skill Games, Artistic Games, Instructional Games, Board Change Games, Card Games, and Sports Games, all of which could be played on any of the 40 million cathode-ray-tube TV sets that were ubiquitous in America at the time. He even detailed add-ons, like a pump controller that would allow players to become firemen and put out blazes around a virtual house displayed on-screen.

  It wasn’t the first time Baer had come up with an idea for games on TV. Fifteen years earlier, in 1951, he worked at another defense contractor, the Loral Corporation, and suggested a rudimentary checkers game. But he didn’t think about games on TV again until that day in 1966, probably because his boss at Loral thought a game inside a TV was a ludicrous idea.

  Let’s Play! was a much grander and more complex idea that would take a lot of time, manpower, and money to create properly. On that summer day in Manhattan, Baer didn’t know how much time or money. But Herb Campman, Sanders’s chief of research and development, believed in the concept and gave Baer a budget of $2,000 for research and $500 for materials. Baer, a complete work addict, would soon be on his way to becoming the father of videogames.

  Little has been written about how Baer’s early life informed his later work. In fact, Baer was infected by the invention bug when young, not long after his family left Cologne in the 1930s. As a kid growing up in Germany, Baer didn’t realize the war was coming. He played with a stick and a hoop outdoors. At night, he and his sister performed puppet shows in their bedroom, laughing and laughing as they transported themselves into worlds of their own creation. The childish plays took Baer’s mind off the schoolkids who bullied him and hit him in the face for being a Jew. After packing their possessions into a half dozen three-by-four-foot wooden crates, in August 1938 the teenage Baer and his family fled Hitler’s Germany for New York City, via a ship that docked in Rotterdam. Many of his Jewish relatives weren’t so lucky and were killed. Baer was too young to comprehend the danger; as the ship steamed toward Ellis Island, he spent most of his time in a swimming pool or playing Monopoly with his sister in the game room. Even then, games intrigued him.

  The family settled into a courtyard apartment near the Bronx Zoo, and Baer worked at a factory for $12 a week, putting buttons onto cosmetic cases. In the winter, the sixteen-year-old made his first invention: a machine that sped up the process of making leatherette goods. He got the engineering bug when he saw an ad for a correspondence course that read “Big Money Servicing Radios. Be a Genuine ‘Radiotrician.’ ” Baer was so excited about this new radio technology that he began to have dreams about resistors, coils, and capacitors. In a small store on Lexington Avenue, he listened to the radios he fixed, hearing the news of the Blitz on London and the invasion of Poland by the Germans.

  By April 1942, Baer was an engineer in World War II as well, learning to prepare roads and bridges for infantry grunts and armored troops. He also laid and removed mines by gingerly digging around in the earth with a bayonet. Life as an engineer turned to life overseas in Bristol, England, teaching military intelligence courses, where he led classes for GIs on subjects such as recognizing German uniforms, ranks, organizational affiliations, and weapons handling. In Tidworth, he and his team created a military intelligence school that trained 120,000 Americans. Part of the school was an immense exhibit hall that included a huge cache of German weapons and vehicles. Ensconced in an industrial hangarlike edifice, the museum was featured in the November 3, 1944, issue of YANKS magazine. In his spare time, Baer secretly wrote a comprehensive manual on weaponry. He kept inventing, even fashioning AM radios from German mine detectors.

  The organizational skills Baer learned in the military would serve him well as he began work on his videogame machine. Too, his experiences in the army imbued him with a self-confidence and talent for communication that helped him open up to those above him in rank. He may have been a nerd who cared more about technology than girls, but he was a surprisingly charismatic nerd who didn’t hide away a good idea when he truly believed he had one; he had chutzpah.

  His design skills improved as he worked on radio equipment in college in Chicago, and on radar equipment and amplifiers at Transitron, a small company in what is now New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Soon, Baer was chief engineer and then vice president at Transitron; he moved up the ranks because he was able to get things done quickly and accurately. By the time Sanders Associates made him a chief engineer, he was more of a manager than an inventor. Yet he yearned to get his hands dirty.

  The $2,500 Baer received from his boss for developing Let’s Play! may not seem like much now. But in 1966, the sum was enough to purchase a new car, was one third of the amount most Americans earned yearly, and was more than half the cost of the average home. Baer had two men assigned to the project to do the hourly work. Bill Harrison, a hip-looking, conscientious engineering associate, built the prototypes. Bill Rusch, a cranky, temperamental powerhouse who had studied at MIT, came up with the idea of a “machine-controlled ball that would interact with player-controlled ‘paddles.’ ” Both men were already on Sanders’s payroll.

  The project was top secret and time-consuming, so much so that Rusch brought a guitar to work so he could blow off steam—leading some curious wall-listeners in the company to believe that Baer was working on some sort of technologically advanced musical instrument, perhaps for the Beatles. But Baer’s boss, Herb Campman, didn’t care about rock ’n’ roll. He gave Baer the money for a sensible reason: He felt the company could eventually make games that would work well in training the military. He was not wrong.

  Baer and his wife, Dena, would occasionally canoe in the Merrimack River and walk hand in hand through the Manchester, New Hampshire, snow as it fell. They loved the quaint town. But the weather could be as hostile as the tundra-like blizzards that fell in Capcom’s treacherous Lost Planet. The heavy snows just made Baer work harder. The game box became a consuming project that bordered on obsession. Inventors are like that: zealous to the exclusion of others. It was that way with surveyor George R. Carey, who had the idea for an early TV, the tectroscope, in 1877. It was that way, too, with the twenty-two inventors who tried to make a practical lightbulb after Humphry Davy created incandescent light in 1802, more than seventy-five years before the compulsive Thomas Edison and his team made a bulb that could last twelve hundred hours.

  By the time Baer, Harrison, and Rusch were deep into it, the trio had tested many prototype machines, drably named TV Games #1 through #7. To the untrained eye, the inner workings seemed like a vision of chaos. The insides of even the later prototypes looked like a mass of angel hair pasta swirling in a pot of boiling hot water.

  Yet the machine worked like magic. It hooked up to a TV’s antenna terminals and used the frequencies of channel 3 or channel 4. On the screen were what Baer called “spots,” little white squares that could be moved around smoothly like a puck on the ice. Attached were two metal boxes that had knobs for vertical and horizontal manipulation. TV Games #1 used four vacuum tubes. There were no circuitry chips; they were luxuries that were too expensive at the time. And there were no transistors. Although
Higinbotham used them in his tests, Baer didn’t yet trust transistor technology. But when the box was switched on and that spot moved on-screen for the first time, it was quite the eureka moment. Baer didn’t jump up and down or wave his fist in the air. But inside, he was thrilled and amazed.

  What the primitive contraption would do was extraordinary. It would make the television an extension of you, the player. It would let you interact with a square on a black-and-white screen, and if you had even the lamest imagination, it made you believe you were volleying at tennis, aiming carefully as a brave marksman, even playing hero to the innocent as you saved lives.

  While the design work proceeded apace, there were continual roadblocks. Worker bees would be called off the project, assigned to work on some secret, pressing defense initiative. At the same time, Sanders executives sometimes seemed aloof and uninterested. In addition, the machine itself became unwieldy. One of the early prototypes was completely impractical, with a chassis that was as large as a kitchen sink. It also looked like something out of high school shop class.

  On June 14, 1967, Baer showed Herb Campman a shooting game with a toy gun rigged up with a light mechanism, which interacted with the TV screen. Campman and Sanders’s patent lawyer was impressed enough to call a meeting with the company president and the stodgy board of directors—the next day. Baer had seven games he wanted to show on a color TV set: chess, steeple chase, a fox-and-hounds game, target shooting, a color wheel game, a bucket-filling game, and that firefighter game in which you’d whale on a pump handle like you were trying to get water from a well. If you did it right, water would get to a window in a house. If you failed, the house would go up in flames. On the night before the demo, Baer frantically searched for a script explaining the seven games that he’d recorded circus-barker-style on a sixty-minute Mercury cassette tape. Though he found the tape quickly, Baer was still apprehensive. He tossed and turned in his bed. But he was ready.