Inventor of first game console has passed away
Ralph H. Baer, the inventor of the very first game console, passed away on Saturday at the age of 92. The ‘Brown Box’ developed by Baer appeared on the market in the early 1970s as the Magnavox Odyssey.
Baer got the idea to use the increasingly cheaper TVs for games in 1966, while working as a technician for an American defense electronics company. He convinced his boss of his idea and developed several prototypes with a budget of a few thousand dollars. These eventually resulted in the ‘Brown Box’, so named because of the brown tape used, which was intended to give the impression of wood.
The inventor and his company also obtained a broad patent for a system that “when combined with a TV, was able to produce and manage dots on a screen.” The company Magnavox licensed the system and in 1972 the game console appeared on the market as the Magnavox Odyssey. 100,000 were sold that year and a total of 350,000 were sold.
The Odyssey consisted of 40 transistors and 40 diodes and ran no software. The games were on so-called ‘game cards’: in fact individual PCBs that fit into a slot that resembled a ROM card slot. Each game came with colored plastic sheets that had to be hung in front of the TV to add color. Magnavox supplied two controllers as standard and a light gun also appeared. This accessory was a large rifle called Shooting Gallery that reacted to light from the TV.
Several successors to the Odyssey appeared and in Europe the original appeared as the Odyssey 2001, after Philips took over Magnavox in 1974. Meanwhile, Atari had already launched the popular Pong. Baer and his company then sued Atari for patent infringement and Pong was said to be too much like a tennis game for the Odyssey. In the 1980s, Nintendo tried to argue that the inventor’s patents were invalid because a tennis-like game, Tennis for Two, had already been developed in 1958. The judge ruled against the Japanese game company because that game could not be regarded as a video game because no video signal was used, but was played with an oscilloscope. All patent cases won, according to Baer, brought in a total of more than 100 million dollars.
The Odyssey was not the technician’s only achievement: at the end of the seventies he was still responsible for the game Simon and its successor Super Simon. These were round electronic devices with four colored surfaces that could light up. The player had to repeat the pattern of lighting up by pressing the squares.