TITLE
Genesis: How the Home Video Games Industry Began
AUTHOR
Ralph Baer
PUBLICATION
RalphBaer.com
YEAR
1999
ARTICLE TYPE
Postmortem
FROM THE ARTICLE
Where do novel ideas come from? Sometimes they come from left field, when you least expect them.In 1966, I was the manager of the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates Inc., a Defense Industry company and at the time the largest employer in the State of New Hampshire. At the time, my division had grown to nearly five hundred engineers, technicians and support people and I was a busy man. While we were involved in some display programs, none of the work in my division, or in the rest of the Company for that matter, involved development of broadcast television technology. As for me, ever since my early days of television broadcast studio equipment and TV receiver design work at Loral back in 1951, my TV-engineering training and experience had occasionally surfaced to think about ways of using a TV set for something other than watching standard broadcasts.
There were about 40 million TV sets in the US homes alone in 1966, to say nothing of many more millions of TV sets in the rest of the world. They were literally begging to be used for something other than watching commercial television broadcasts!
In 1966, thoughts about playing games using an ordinary TV set began to percolate in my mind.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Atari
Magnavox
GAMES MENTIONED
Pong
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Nolan Bushnell
John Grady
PLATFORMS MENTIONED
Odyssey
ALTERNATE LINK
Archived Copy @ Internet Archive