The big bosses filed into a dreary conference room on June 15. There was whispering and conferring and the raising of eyebrows during the demonstration. Bill Harrison noticed that Sanders himself was completely uninterested. He was gossiping about a competitor with another colleague. But, ultimately, the suits seemed impressed. Harold Pope, the affable company president who’d come up through the ranks as an engineer, didn’t quite know what to do with what he had seen. Pope’s command to Baer was “Build us something we can sell or license.”
“Build us something we can sell” was a grim declaration that would irk Baer during the next several years. Compared to figuring out how to sell it, getting the console to work properly was the least of his worries. Because gossip had begun among Sanders employees, Baer made sure the work in his ten-by-twenty-foot lab was treated as a top secret project. He told Harrison, “I don’t care if people in the company think we’re making some kind of guitar. I just want to get the job done without a lot of questions from people who aren’t involved.” It was like the first rule of Fight Club. Baer told his team in no uncertain terms, “You don’t talk about TV Games.”
In February 1967, the three created the Quiz Light Pen, which, when attached to TV Games, could be used for an educational instruction and game show–like experience. “Just point it at the screen and click a button to make it work,” announced Baer in impresario mode as he spoke to the camera in a primitive half-hour black-and-white instructional video, which showed how aiming the pen at small boxes on the screen could be used to answer multiple choice questions. Maybe it could even be used for a game show, thought Baer, like Jeopardy!
The inventiveness didn’t stop there. In a memo stamped “Company Private,” Baer also made plans for a steering wheel for racing games and a device that would let you make artistic drawings on the TV screen. There was a baseball game and a strange ESP-like number guessing game. There would be a peripheral for a golf game that included a putter. There was skeet shooting, soccer, and horse racing, too. And there was a cool, addictive version of a Ping-Pong game, the game that people would play the most. (It was also a game that would soon be ripped off, become more popular than Baer ever imagined, and herald a very nasty lawsuit.)
Admittedly, these games were all done with “spots,” not high-quality artwork. To make the games feel more real, the team designed plastic overlays that, through static electricity, stuck to the TV screen. They looked like Howard Johnson restaurant place mats but were somewhat transparent. There was no masterful artwork to the overlays, but the best of them resembled the most dramatic back glass art on pinball games of the day. The first joysticks included were two controllers that had horizontal and vertical abilities and knobs to add English to the ball, somewhat like Tennis for Two (which Baer said he never saw at the Brookhaven National Laboratory).
More ideas for technology and games spewed forth, and so did some manna from heaven: $8,000 more from Sanders’s Campman. The goal in early 1968 was to beef up the console’s circuitry to make it a leaner, meaner machine. Rusch was also able to make those all-important square spots circular, even star-shaped. Initially, Rusch preened, thinking he had done something as historic as translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. Baer was totally enthused, too, until they found a problem with the spots. They moved randomly when they weren’t supposed to. They ran up or down or to the side like feral animals. Sometimes, they’d even change their shapes. Baer decided to stick with the square spots, even though Rusch put up a fuss. This was a constant cycle between the two. Baer would try to mend fences with Rusch. He’d seem OK for a while. Then he’d go off the rails and get angry again.
Inventing was natural to Baer, Harrison, and Rusch; as engineers, they got it. But Baer lay awake at night thinking about the company president’s dictum. Over and over, he asked himself, “How do we sell this? We’re a defense contractor. We can’t manufacture this. We don’t have the infrastructure. Do we license it to someone? How do we do that?” To complicate matters, he still had no business plan whatsoever. By mid-June, management was unyielding; they demanded precise details. The business plan questions kept coming with far more frequency.
Baer racked his brain. His first plan was to involve the nascent cable TV industry. Cable TV, available in the United States since the late 1940s, was in the doldrums. Americans didn’t want to pay for television programming unless mountains interfered with their over-air signals. In the late sixties, people were more than content with innovations in network television—like the first Super Bowl, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (which dealt with societal issues in a science fiction way), and the ever naughty Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (on which British mod-rockers the Who went wild and maniacally destroyed their instruments).
Baer believed his TV Games idea could give the cable industry a “shot in the arm.” To Campman, Baer suggested, “We could create the action, and the cable company would provide colorful backgrounds for our games” from their studios. Especially since the plastic layovers Baer and his team had been able to create were graphically unimpressive, the plan had merit. Cable companies could provide an almost photographic level of detail for backgrounds.
The TelePrompter Corporation, the people who now make the machines from which newscasters and others on TV read, also outfitted sixty thousand families with cable TV. They were the country’s biggest cable provider at the time. After some prodding, one of the founders, Hubert “Hub” Schlafly, agreed to meet with Baer in New Hampshire. Schlafly so thoroughly enjoyed the games experience that he suggested to Irving Berlin Kahn, the company’s president, that he better get up to Nashua because something important was happening there. A week later, an impeccably dressed Kahn arrived from New York in a stretch limo. After that, there was a series of excited, hopeful meetings with TelePrompter executives in New York City. But a recession had hit the nation, and TelePrompter wimped out: They claimed to be out of money when it came to new projects. The same sour outcome occurred after initially optimistic meetings with Manhattan Cable and Warner Cable. Who knows how much more quickly today’s downloadable games would have become popular had Baer’s cable deal been given the green light back in the early 1970s. Conceivably, a company like TelePrompter might now be as vital as Sony or even Nintendo in the videogame industry.
If Baer’s dealings with the cable companies were disappointing, he hadn’t endured anything yet. When the TelePrompter deal fell through, Campman unceremoniously ordered an end to the flow of money for the game console. Other projects needed work, and Baer hadn’t proven the viability of TV Games as a business. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Baer was able to convince Campman to add some more research and development money and reassign engineer Bill Harrison to the project. Harrison’s first order of business was to go shopping at Sears to purchase a plastic toy gun. But he wasn’t going to play cops and robbers. With a mini-flashlight-sized lightbulb and a transistor amplifier, Harrison refashioned the toy into a weapon that worked when aimed at an object on the TV. Even more valuable was Harrison’s savvy when it came to circuitry, which allowed him to reduce the number of parts in the latest prototype by about 50 percent. But the box looked somehow unadorned. Baer asked Harrison to go out to the store to get some self-adhesive kitchen cabinet liner that made the box look a little better. While the liner had a cheesy, basement rec room look, it inspired a generally catchy name, the Brown Box. Like the adhesive, it stuck.
In 1968, there were more than one hundred TV makers in the United States alone. Baer got the idea to phone each of them to see if one would consider manufacturing TV Games. He had some help: Sanders’s director of patents, Louis Etlinger, was a smart New York lawyer with a folksy demeanor that made people believe he was from the sticks. Etlinger made the cold calls and charmed his way into setting up appointment after appointment with major corporations. But it was Baer who had to sell the idea, based on his demonstrations with Harrison. While Baer was an erudite speaker, he didn’t have a salesman’s swagger. In one early meeti
ng, a buyer from Sears felt their numerous retail stores would be mobbed by kids who wanted to play the system in the store, but wouldn’t buy it. The Sears buyer felt that the stores would be forced into the role of babysitter for hordes of screaming brats. Baer sorely needed a Madison Avenue marketer to help him from that point on. But there was no budget for a showperson who would come to meetings armed with talking points and glittering generalities.
The meetings with RCA were typical of the constant challenges and failures that Baer faced time and time again. In April 1969, RCA began serious negotiations to license the Brown Box. But these fell apart when the megacorporation began playing dirty pool. After months of waiting, the contract finally arrived.
“It’s no good,” said Etlinger.
“What do you mean?” asked Baer.
“It leaves Sanders with next to nothing.”
“That’s it, then?” asked Baer.
“That’s it,” responded Etlinger.
When Bill Enders, one of the RCA executives who was earnestly gung-ho about the Brown Box, became the vice president of marketing at Magnavox, he engaged in extensive, detailed talks with Sanders through Baer and Etlinger. By mid-July, the two (along with Bill Harrison) were jetting to Magnavox’s corporate headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for the most significant demonstration of Baer’s life.
As showtime approached, the weather didn’t cooperate. The Midwest had been besieged by rainstorms since Independence Day, and the area around Fort Wayne had seen water rise to emergency proportions. The city of 178,000 was situated in a floodplain, and loyal residents had to take the good with the bad. Baer wondered if the high waters amounted to a bad sign. As he drove, he thought he was traveling in some surreal, Night of the Hunter–like land of religion. He saw revival tents everywhere. He wondered to himself, “If Magnavox’s engineers are this religious, can they make a good product?”
When he and Harrison set up the machine at the end of a highly polished oak table in a fancy conference room, they were nervous and on edge. Once the presentation began, Baer saw a room full of bored executives who were probably more concerned about eating dinner and getting to the bar for a drink than with listening to a pitch about what they most likely considered to be a throwaway toy.
Yet there was one person who nodded his head, his eyes focused and bright. After Baer did his dog and pony show for about twenty minutes, showing each game and each peripheral, the executive actually seemed to be downright thrilled.
“We’re going to do this, and we’re going to commit a million dollars to it,” proclaimed Gerry Martin, Magnavox’s vice president and general manager for console product. The formerly sullen executives nodded their heads and exchanged huzzahs like the finest yes-men money could buy.
The Sanders trio was flying high. But they didn’t celebrate. They had been dealt too many disappointments, so they held back until the contracts arrived. One night, Harrison and Baer were on the road and stopped into a greasy spoon diner. They had a thrifty meal, saved the receipts, and talked a lot about how great it was to be doing what they wanted to do. That was the extent of the celebration for the first videogame device ever made for consumers.
It took Magnavox another eight months to begin work on the project in earnest at their Morrison, Tennessee, manufacturing plant. For the Brown Box to hit store shelves in time for Christmas, Magnavox engineers had to break their backs working overtime as the deadline approached. They had proved their mettle as far as Baer and his team were concerned. Meanwhile, Sanders was doing poorly in the recession, and Baer became concerned about the future of his job. To make matters worse, he heard some disturbing news from Magnavox. For cost reasons the company axed the golf putt add-on and the fireman game with the pump, which would have required a higher retail price tag. There had also been heated discussion about whether or not to make the Brown Box work with four players at once, but this, too, never made it past the planning stages. Adding circuitry for color spots on the TV screen was also nixed. Only those overlays remained.
“You know the one thing that bothers me,” Baer told Harrison in their small office.
“What’s that?”
“The fact that it won’t be in color. Color would make a big difference.”
Harrison nodded. That was all he could do.
Just as sad was that once Magnavox licensed the idea for TV Games, Ralph Baer didn’t have much say in anything that happened, not even in the product’s new name, Skill-O-Vision. To Baer, the moniker sounded like a cheap sideshow penny arcade game.
By mid-October 1971, Magnavox felt they had a potential hit on their hands. Market surveys were held over a period of four days at the company’s retail stores in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids. Eighty-nine percent of those who played Skill-O-Vision for a couple of hours liked it “very much.” Even though just eighty-two people participated, a laughable number by today’s standards for surveys, there was a certain tempered glee in the interoffice memos that circulated to key executives in Magnavox enclaves around the country. On October 15, one executive wrote with barely muted enthusiasm, “The price of $75 presents no barrier.”
When Magnavox became involved in Ralph Baer’s project, they took over in the way a giant wave totally engulfs a small shell on the beach. The change of the name from TV Games to Skill-O-Vision was kind of a move sideways. The latter recalled Hollywood producer Mike Todd’s Smell-O-Vision, a dated technique of adding scents to movies that never really took off. When the name was changed to Odyssey, it was an inspired move, to a name that Baer thought really sang. It sounded like the beginning of a mysterious, futuristic adventure. Additionally, the look of the box was quite beautiful for the time. That fake brown wood grain was gone. Added were pieces of sleek white and black plastic and a box that looked like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nonetheless while TV Games wasn’t a sexy name, it did say exactly what the console would do. The name Odyssey did nothing of the sort.
The inventor’s input became even less valuable to Magnavox as the launch date approached. Baer himself was transferred between two divisions within Sanders, and he began to suffer from depression. After a hernia operation in February 1972, he languished in a hospital room, saturnine and in some pain. Then Campman and Etlinger arrived with Cheshire cat smiles on their faces. They unrolled a long sheet of paper that bore an oversized facsimile of a check for $100,000, the first payment from Magnavox for licensing. It didn’t matter that the check went into Sanders’s bank account. Baer felt valued again, and his doldrums lifted in moments. In the second or two it took for a blip on the Odyssey to cross the screen, Baer felt happier and years younger than his age.
When Baer attended the press presentation for Magnavox products at a restaurant in Central Park in late May, he beamed like a proud father. Everything was hyperreal, from the heady smell of spring flowers to the excited looks on journalists’ faces in the room. But he wasn’t introduced as the inventor of the Odyssey. He wasn’t introduced at all. To Baer, it mattered little. He was struck by the splendor of the finished machine. As he left and walked through the park, he was flying high.
The Odyssey hit the stores backed by a fairly odd marketing plan. Consumers were somewhat bemused by a Frank Sinatra commercial touting the machine. After all, Sinatra had retired from the music business in 1971 because his career was doing so miserably at the time. His recent movies (like the awful western comedy Dirty Dingus Magee) were failures, as were his recent albums; although critically acclaimed, the album Watertown had sold just thirty thousand copies. (Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t release his landmark comeback tune, “New York, New York,” until 1973.) Kids, the target audience, didn’t care about Sinatra; kids then liked the Beatles’ solo efforts, Elton John, David Bowie, and Stevie Wonder. Magnavox’s pitch was considered completely uncool. Worse, the Sinatra commercial indicated, perhaps intentionally, that the system would work only with Magnavox televisions. In reality, it worked with any TV that had a rabbit ears connection
in the back and a picture tube large enough to hold the overlays. Despite the confusion, people paid for one hundred thousand Odysseys at $100 each during the 1972 holiday season.
The stylish magazine and newspaper ads were perhaps better selling tools. They were artfully detailed and packed with juicy information, so exciting that the games seemed to jump off the page and proudly dance in midair. Even the copywriting sang like the best of Madison Avenue poetry: “With Odyssey, you participate in television. You’re not just a spectator. The fascinating Casino Action of Monte Carlo, the excitement of Wimbledon, the thrills of a heated game of football—can all be duplicated right in your own living room.”
Yet the Odyssey did not reap the expected rewards. Each machine cost Magnavox almost $50 to make. The 350,000 made and sold between 1972 and 1975 cost approximately $15 million. Testing the unit with consumers added at least $1 million. Sinatra’s fee added another million. Magnavox’s receipts came in at only $20 million. Baer postulated that the returns of some defective products ate up much of the remaining profits. He tried to convince the company of the need to release more and more games to support the machine, perhaps the first time the razor-and-blades economic theory was applied to videogames. In other words, the Magnavox system should have been sold like a Gillette razor, cheaply, and forward-thinking games should have been sold like blades, where the real profit lay. As the years passed, Baer wrote impassioned letters to Magnavox, suggesting new games. He told Magnavox of numerous Odyssey knockoffs around the world, but the company didn’t immediately pursue these ripoff artists in court. There were plans to sell a kind of Magna-Odyssey, a fattened device that included a seventeen-inch color TV and an impressive cabinet for $424. Baer was brought in to try to figure out what to take out to get the price down appreciably. But the Magna-Odyssey was never released. Like many ideas at Magnavox, it became severely bogged down by company posturing and politics.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 3
