Before I became a marijuana maven, I was a freelance writer of some distinction. One subject that fascinated me was the origins of video games.
One day in 1979 I walked into a Times Square arcade and saw lines of customers waiting to play Space Invaders. I was into Pong, Breakout, Super Breakout and some of the other original games. But Space Invaders quickly became a phenomenon, signaling the introduction of a new form of American entertainment. I told my editor at the Soho News in New York, Peter Occhiogrosso. He assigned me to write a feature that turned into a cover story, which led to a book (Video Invaders) and a job (editing Video Games magazine).
I tell you all this because Ralph Baer, the farther of video games, has died. He was 92.
Baer worked for a defense contracting company, Sanders and Associates, in Nashua, New Hampshire when he began moving dots around a TV screen in 1966 - seven years before Atari released Pong. Baer's invention was originally licensed to Magnavox, who manufactured the first-ever home video game console, Odyssey 100, in 1972.
When I discovered Baer's role in the history of video games, I tracked him down in New Hampshire. In an exclusive interview for Video Invaders (Arco, 1982), Baer told me: "Pong was a derivative of Odyssey, not the other way around. The coin-op games are derivative of what we did back in the '60s.
"Early in 1967," he explained, "we had the most basic ball-and-paddle games working. By September, we were playing hockey games that were rather fancy, meaning the ball motion was complicated - the kind of thing that didn't reappear in games for years and years afterwards."
It was a good angle to focus on for the book: Who really invented video games? Was it hackers on mainframes who had engineered space war games at MIT and Stanford in the early '60s, Baer or Nolan Bushnell, who founded Atari in 1972?
By the time I began researching the book, Bushnell had already sold Atari to Warner Communications for $32 million and started Chuck E. Cheese with the proceeds. "Pong was actually on the market before Odyssey," he told me. "I remember being quite surprised to see Odyssey. (Baer) did some really good pioneering work in the analog field while we were strictly digital. A lot of work he was doing back then came before the integrated circuits that made my life very easy. He's a very bright man."
Though Bushnell didn't quite give Baer the credit he was looking for, Baer did have some kind workd for his competitor as well. "He did a a hell of a lot for our industry," the German-born electrical engineer acknowledged. "If he hadn't come along with Pong I think the whole thing would've gone down the drain. Bushnell was the catalyst - there's no question in my mind about that. I'd just like to see myself identified more often as the real inventor."
So the next time you play an arcade game or fire up the Xbox, think about Ralph Baer, the man who started it all.
