Bushnell had past experience with amusement park arcades and had witnessed firsthand the popularity of pinball machines. He began to think of ways that the game could be retailed. Meanwhile, a creative young entrepreneur named Nolan Bushnell remembered playing Spacewar during his years as a student at the University of Utah. Executives at Magnavox lacked the vision to see that television games had the potential to become an independent industry, and did not give the product the support it needed. Ultimately, the problem was that Magnavox saw Odyssey as a gimmick to sell more television sets. Many potential consumers were under the impression-sometimes encouraged by Magnavox salesmen-that Odyssey would only work on Magnavox televisions. Among the contributing factors, poor marketing played a large role. With fewer than 200,000 units sold, Magnavox Odyssey was not considered a commercial success. After a few years and numerous test and advancements, Baer and his colleagues developed a prototype for the first multiplayer, multiprogram video game system, nicknamed the “Brown Box.” Sanders licensed the Brown Box to Magnavox, which released the device as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Sanders senior management were impressed with Baer’s progress and assigned him the task of turning this technology into a commercially viable product. Once Baer had established how it was possible to interact with the television set, he and his team were able to design and build increasingly sophisticated prototypes.
VIDEO GAME SYSTEM DESIGNER TV
Called TVG#1 or TV Game Unit #1, the device, when used with an alignment generator, produced a dot on the television screen that could be manually controlled by the user. In 1967, assisted by Sanders technician Bob Tremblay, Baer created the first of several video game test units. In 1966, while working for Sanders Associates, Inc., Baer began to explore this idea. Engineer Ralph Baer was certain this technology could be used to play games. By the 1960s, millions of Americans had invested in televisions for their homes, but these television sets were only used for the viewing of entertainment. In fact, video games did not get their true start from computer programmers, but from an engineer skilled in another major invention of the 20th century: the television set. To play Spacewar one needed access to a research facility’s computer, which kept the game’s influence limited to the small computer technology sphere. The result, called “Spacewar,” caused a sensation on campus and variations on the game soon spread to other universities that had computer engineering programs.Īlthough Spacewar was fun to play, it was never destined for released to the general public, since computers were still too expensive for personal use. Inspired by the science fiction novels Russell and his friends enjoyed, these computers “hackers” decided to create a dueling game between two spaceships.
Students Steve Russell and his friends were granted access to the school’s new PDP-1 computer providing they used it to create a demonstration program that (1) utilized as many of the computer’s resources as possible and “taxed those resources to the limit,” (2) remained interesting even after repeated viewings, which meant that each run needed to be slightly different and (3) was interactive. It was this mindset that led a group of MIT students during the 1960s to create one of the first and most groundbreaking computer games. As an added bonus, computer programmers were able to learn from the creation of games as well because it allowed them to break away from the usual subroutines and challenge the computer’s capabilities. Games like tic-tac-toe or William Higinbotham’s 1958 Tennis for Two were excellent ways to attract public interest and support. Most people had both a limited understanding of what these electronic behemoths were able to do and an unfamiliarity with the types of mathematical equations these machines were regularly programmed to compute. They had practical reasons to create games.ĭuring the 1940s and 1950s, computers took up entire rooms and were so expensive that only universities and large companies could afford them. These early computer programmers weren’t just wasting time or looking for new ways to goof off.
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