XYgame.com - Blog

The first video game was created by the engineers at Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defense contractor. Ralph Baer was working Sanders Associates as manager of equipment design division. In August 1966 he came up with an idea building sometimes for $19.95, a game for TV set. He allocated few of his employees, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to the project. In 1967, Rusch suggested a new game in which a hardwired logic circuit projected a spot flying across the screen. Originally, the object of the game was for players to catch the spot with manually controlled dots. Over time, the players’ dots evolved into paddles, and the game became ping pong.

Sanders Associates had a rough time in the late sixties, down-sizing from 11,000 to 4,000 employees. As a military contractor, Sanders couldn’t suddenly go into the toy business, so Baer had to find a customer for his invention. Baer tried to sell his invention to many parties, and finally in 1971 he made a deal with Magnavox. The product was called Magnavox Odyssey and it was first products were sold in 1972. Unfortunately Magnavox did a bad job - they over-engineered the machine and upped the price so that the system was sold for $100 and the advertisement campaign was poor. Ralph Baer’s dream of $20 dollar game became a fiasco and his name was forgotten by most people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 10:49 am and is filed under History of video games.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.