All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (5 page)

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.

Through most of the brainstorming and all of the hoopla, Baer was relegated to the sidelines, like an aging football star aching to be sent in for a big play. Yes, he and Sanders had licensed the rights to a mammoth corporation. And Sanders certainly received monetary rewards for the contract into which they had entered. But Baer was
not just a “company man” who didn’t care about anything more than his weekly salary or about becoming rich from his videogame inventions. In fact, he did think about asking for more money and getting himself a lawyer on a few occasions. He was never told exactly how much money was coming in from worldwide licenses of his game technology and from where; Sanders feared he would sue for more money. They tried to keep all sales data from him. But he saw the total projected on a big screen at Sanders’s monthly meetings. He knew he could have gone to court. He was sure he could have won. But he chose not to, feeling as he did that he still had much more inventing to do.

Still at Sanders after the release of the system, Baer (along with engineers Larry Cope and George Mitchell) continued to hatch numerous game ideas. He developed the first detailed concept for an arcade game loosely based upon ABC-TV’s
Monday Night Football
. It was a complex game that involved offense, defense, coaching, and a joystick that let you move in eight directions. Mitchell and Baer took their machine on the road to Kenner, Bally, Coleco, Ideal, and Mattel, but they couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm. Bally in Chicago was the worst. In the meeting Baer saw a group of well-dressed people who looked very grim, uninterested in his idea and generally angry with him. He was glad to get out of there.

Occasionally, he peppered Magnavox with ideas for new games, not the least of which was Run Silent, Run Deep, based on the World War II submarine warfare movie starring Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster, from United Artists. Magnavox always balked. For Centronics’ Gamex division in Las Vegas, Baer designed the display portion for the first electronic casino blackjack game, along with a horse racing gambling game called Photo Finish. Just as the manufacturing process was about to commence, all work stopped: Word was that certain unsavory characters had strongly suggested that Gamex get the hell out of Dodge. While the lead engineer was hired
away to Bally in Chicago, most of the others ran for the hills like Sonic the Hedgehog on speed. The mob controlled much of Vegas in those days, and their grip only began to let up after the FBI’s massive assault on gambling crime in the late 1970s. That was too late for Gamex and, by default, Ralph Baer.

But Baer wasn’t done. To Campman’s joy, he created videogame training exercises for the military. Later, with two cohorts, he invented the Simon memory game, a popular toy that used flashing light sequences. Milton Bradley’s marketing of Simon was sheer Madison Avenue genius, and included the adver-poem: “Simon’s a computer. Simon has a brain. You either do what Simon says or else go down the drain.” Also in the seventies, after a panicked call from Coleco about the Telstar, Baer helped to get a nasty bug out of the three-game console in which Coleco had invested $30 million. The Telstar was emitting too much interference for the FCC to approve its distribution to toy stores. Baer added a simple resistor to the inside that fixed the problem. Baer did this even though he knew Coleco’s game system was very like the Odyssey and thus a competitor to his baby.

The Telstar was just one of many consoles obviously influenced by Baer’s creation. But throughout this roller-coaster ride with Magnavox and beyond, Baer did his best to keep calm and to look on the bright side. His struggle to bring videogames to every home with a television set was undoubtedly a superhuman feat, the Alan Moore/
Watchmen
kind, which required years of stamina in the face of unremitting disappointment as doors constantly closed in his face. The business travails involved in touting his invention would have broken lesser people.

Ralph Baer remained strong because he knew in his gut that games would soon become part of our collective consciousness. His game machine didn’t become an overnight hit. But the ideas he put forth when he first proposed TV Games are still the basis of games
today. The sports games he outlined and prototyped would become billion-dollar industries in themselves—when made by others a decade or so later. His brainstorm for multiplayer online games also became a billion-dollar industry—three decades later. His idea to incorporate cable TV as a distribution medium would become reality thirty years later, when broadband cable allowed games to be downloaded onto the newest consoles. And that light gun that shot at the screen was not so terribly different from the wireless controllers and guns of today. So back in the seventies, Ralph Baer was the Seer, a quiet Nostradamus. Every idea he laid out on paper came to fruition in the future.