Ralph Baer would tell us there is a simple technical definition we can go by: if you are playing a game on a screen and that game data was conveyed to said screen by a video signal, then you have a video game otherwise you don’t. Are they the proud parents of the video game?īefore ruling on Baer’s case, we must decide what the heck constitutes a video game anyway.
Ralph Baer (L) and Bill Harrison demonstrate their video game prototype.
But did he really, truly invent the video game or have a valid claim to its paternity? Well, despite my glib pronouncement in the prologue of the book, the answer is a little more complicated. I don’t begrudge him any of that: the man was absolutely a key cog in the transformation of video games from backroom lab experiments to mass market entertainment, and he lived in the shadow of Nolan Bushnell much longer than he deserved. So there it is right? Extra, extra read all about it! Alexander Smith says Ralph Baer invented the video game! Baer himself would have certainly been pleased to see those words in print had he lived long enough to see this book published, as he always claimed the mantle “Father of Video Games” and defended that title against all comers. A more important statement to analyze is the claim I make at the end of this little vignette: “But Baer was the first person to suggest creating an interactive entertainment experience by conveying game data to a display through use of a video signal, so even though he never used the term in any of his subsequent documentation or patents, he is nevertheless the progenitor of what we now call the video game.” Whether this brainstorm happened on August 30 or August 31 though is really a minor matter of little consequence. Nevertheless, that’s his story, so we are sticking to it. Did he really have a meeting with a client in New York City that afternoon and then immediately scurry back up to Nashua? Its not impossible, but maybe a tad improbable. A 1966 bus was probably taking it even slower than that. After all, he was down from his native Nashua, New Hampshire, to meet a business client, and Google tells me that’s a good four hour trip in the modern day by car. In interviews, Baer usually stated he did so back at his office the day after his brainstorm, but the timeframe may not line up. For this reason, we do know that he transformed his crazy bus station idea into a formal memo on September 1, 1966. Ralph Baer was a careful record keeper as befit the meticulous, detail-oriented personality that shines through in his various interviews and in his autobiographical examination of his work in the video game business. Its nice to have a firm date like that to commence the narrative, though its not nearly so firm as one might think. So I opened on a bus station in New York City on August 31, 1966, when Ralph Baer thought to himself it might be neat to control objects displayed on a television set rather than passively consuming network programming. Clearly then, the book should not start at the beginning, but it still needed to focus on a beginning. These primordial works are examined in the book, of course, but they did not feel appropriate as a hook to draw the reader in. Its great that in the late 1940s Alan Turing and Donald Michie wrote chess programs that were never implemented or that Thomas Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann liked to pretend in the lab that a cathode ray beam might be the arc of a missile, but there is no throughline from either of these experiments to the $150 billion industry that exists today. My goal was to document most of the early experiments using a television and/or a digital computer to play a game, but starting at the chronological beginning of these efforts does not make for a compelling opening. It is not necessary to have read the book to comprehend and appreciate the post.Ĭhoosing where exactly to start They Create Worlds was a challenge. It covers material found in the prologue on pages xviii-xx.
#MAGNAVOX ODYSSEY GAMEPLAY SERIES#
This post is part of an ongoing series annotating my book They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol.
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