Ralph Baer

How to Create an Industry the Making of the Brown Box and Pong

Ralph is the kind of guy who creates industries. And indeed, he created a whole industry. Not the kind of small, fragile market that appears at the beginning of each summer and that disappear when people start to think about their return to work, but the kind of industry that lasts and grows to a multi-billion dollar market. This industry even has a name: we call it the video game industry.

And that's what I’d call a pretty good achievement.

The venerable German-born inventor started to think about some TV-based gaming system in 1966 (see the scan of his first design notes here). With some coworkers, he created the Brown Box, the very first programmable TV-based video game console. The concept was bought by Magnavox and later became the Magnovox Odissey (shipped in 1972).

The original Brown Box (Mr. Baer brought one on stage) was designed for two players. Each player is supposed to manipulate a controler with two variators (one for the up-down direction and another one for the left-right direction) in order to move a point or a cursor on screen. Mr. Baer and his fellow assistant (sorry – didn’t heard his name) gave us a demonstration of the Brown Box tennis game.

Figure 2: the Maganvox Odissey

There is something weird to see this age-old device deliver its message: two bars, a line in the center and a ball that crosses the screen. For those who think the ball is moving on a straight line, you would have been surprised by its strange movements – some kind of randomy sinusoidal line that seems quite difficult to get on the other side (to be honnest, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been able to play this game). A few swicthes allows you to “drastically” change the game: the two players on the same side (let’s call this “squash”), one player against a wall (let’s call this “I have no friend”) and so on.

This first talk was pleasing. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the beginning of the talk (thanks to my sense of direction; I had a few issues, the main one that I wasn’t able to find the Paris GDC building).

Little Big World