What can brown do for you?

German / American scientist / engineer Ralph Baer (enough slashes for you?)came up with the idea in 1951 to attach a gaming system to an ordinary TV set. This earth shattering idea, in 1951 no less, would mean that any home with a TV could play games. Doesn't say much for the TV shows back then does it? TV out only 5 years and people are already thinking of playing video games on the damn idiot box.

Ralph came over to America with his family from Germany in the late 1930's. His father had quite rightly diagnosed the coming hell that would be Nazi Germany and moved his Jewish family pronto. He attended technical school and graduated a radio service technician in 1940. After a stint as an intelligence officer in the war he went back to school and earned a BSc degree in 1949. His specialty was the little known science of television. He eventually joined Sanders Associates and stayed with them till he retired in the late 80's. The company is a defence contractor
specializing in electronic systems.

Although he thought about the idea in 1951, it wasn't until 1966 that he started work on the first video game console ultimately called the "Brown Box". What his bosses thought about it I don't know. Still it must have seemed odd when their primary contracts were complex electronic devices for military applications.

By 1971 he had the thing going and Sanders Associates licensed the gizmo to Magnavox whose clever marketing department spotted a dud with its original name and changed it to the Magnavox Odyssey. By today's standards it was pretty plain. It lacked sound and had a bizarre method for dealing with black and white TVs (by far the dominant set in the homes of Americans then): the system was furnished with coloured plastic sticky overlays to put on the TV screen to simulate colour. Yeesh. Wonder how that worked if you changed game and left the old overlay on?

It did, however, have some epochal developments, genre defining technology, such as game cartridges and cool extras like the first "light gun". You plugged it into the console, loaded the shoot em up game and you could actually aim at the screen and, in real time with not that shabby accuracy, develop a video game "skill". Pretty heavy for 1972. Trouble was any light source worked for the gun, but hey, not many homes had electric lights then either.

Magnavox had its headaches marketing the machine and spent more time either suing or being sued by rival video game companies over the next few decades. In an ironic twist, video game giant Nintendo actually got its start in the industry marketing the Odyssey in Japan in 1975.