Game Over. Start Again? – Part 1
It began with two squares and one straight line. An entire industry grew from those inauspicious beginnings which would eclipse the music and movie industries in revenue and define whole generations. Video games are nothing new – in fact, they’re probably older than you think. And most of the controversy surrounding marketing the games is also older than you think – almost as old as the industry itself.
The story begins in the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where the need for a user-friendly public demonstration of a massive new room-filling computer system led programmer Willy Higginbotham to create a simple video ping pong game called Tennis For Two. Played not on a television monitor but an oscilloscope, this early precursor to Pong was created in 1958 – truly the first video game, even though it was part of a free public display and not for sale. In 1961, several budding hackers at MIT, led by Steve Russell, created a game called Spacewar on the somewhat less massive PDP-1 minicomputer. Still a hulking mainframe of a computer, the PDP-1 was manufactured and sold to many colleges, and Spacewar became a kind of killer-app demonstration of the machine’s abilities, distributed free of charge.
These games, however, were confined to colleges and research facilities. The first person to give serious thought to bringing video games into the home was a television technician named Ralph Baer. A German immigrant who had narrowly avoided becoming part of a doomed mission in World War II, Baer was a keen inventor who obsessively documented his creations. At a train stop in 1966, as he waited for a train, Baer sketched out four pages of designs, diagrams and ideas for a box which would attach to a television set and play games. He took those notes, created a more formal documentation, and submitted it to the Patent Office. Baer and a small team of hand-picked colleagues built and refined several variations of the device, known only as the TV Gaming Apparatus, while working for military radar contractor Sanders Associates. At the moment, Baer’s invention could only be coaxed into playing primitive fox-and-hound and ping-pong games, but with the addition of the world’s first light gun, which sensed the brightness of objects on the TV screen, Baer’s games suddenly had a possible military training application. The management at Sanders – constantly threatening to shut down Baer’s video game experiments – began to fund the project.
In the end, no military application was found for the TV Gaming Apparatus, and Baer shopped it around to a struggling and uninterested cable TV industry. Hitting up TV manufacturers next, Baer met with an equal lack of interest until he impressed an RCA executive with the device’s potential. RCA, however, didn’t want to license the hardware – it wanted to buy the patents developed by Baer and Sanders Associates outright. When that lone intrigued executive migrated to Magnavox, Baer had a sale in late 1968. It took several years of trips to Magnavox’s development center in Fort Wayne, Indiana to get the final TV Gaming Apparatus – a multi-game system known as the Brown Box for the faux-wood-paneled hardware – ready for mass production. In May 1972, Magnavox launched the world’s first home video game system, Odyssey. In the development process, Magnavox had piled additional game pieces onto the machine, including colorful overlays that would stick to TV screens through static electricity, boosting its price point to $100 – far overshooting Baer’s hoped-for consumer-friendly $19.95 price tag. Containing only discrete components and wiring, there wasn’t a single microchip to be found in the Odyssey. Thanks to a greedy marketing miscalculation – Magnavox instructed local sales reps to try to sell Magnavox TV sets by hinting that the Odyssey would only work with the manufacturer’s own screens – only 100,000 units were sold. A version of Baer’s light gun, the Odyssey Shooting Gallery, also hit the market, as did several extra games – but all of the game variations that the Odyssey could play were internal to the system’s hardware, and the futuristic-looking “game cards” merely triggered those built-in variations.
If the public seemed fascinated but not enthralled with Baer’s baby, it certainly caught the eye of other individuals. A former Stanford student who had tried – and failed – to launch a version of Steve Russell’s Spacewar as a coin-operated arcade video game, Nolan Bushnell attended a public demonstration of the Odyssey early in 1972. Together with a friend, engineer Al Alcorn, Bushnell replicated the video ping-pong game play of Odyssey for his second arcade attraction, Pong. Unlike the sophisticated sci-fi of Spacewar, which required learning an elaborate set of rules and a control scheme to match, Pong was designed as a two-player game to meet Bushnell’s youthful ambition of playing a game with one hand and holding one’s drink or girlfriend in the other. Pong took off, manufactured by Atari’s own newly-opened assembly line facility after Bushnell failed to enthuse manufacturers of electromechanical novelty games about his creation.
The similarities between Odyssey and Pong didn’t go unnoticed, especially not when the success of Pong led Bushnell to trumpet himself as the father of a new industry. He found himself on the receiving end of a patent infringement lawsuit from Ralph Baer and Magnavox, and eventually settled out of court, paying Magnavox a pricey royalty in exchange for becoming a “favored licensee.” The process of fighting that legal battle stalled Atari’s momentum, however – by the time the case was settled, it seemed like every amusement company in America had created identical clones of Pong, including Williams and Midway, two companies which had passed on the opportunity to license the game from Bushnell. After a year-long period in which Magnavox would’ve gotten first dibs on any new product from Atari under the terms of the settlement, Bushnell had Alcorn design a home Pong unit. Unlike Odyssey, this game would only play a single variation – and it was the first all-digital video game, containing the game’s program instructions on a microchip. With financial backing from Sears, Pong was launched nationwide in 1975 and became a consumer sensation, outstripping sales of the now-discontinued Odyssey by nearly two to one.
The sight of Pong’s sales figures sparked another wave of imitators. Magnavox hopped back onto the bandwagon, though their stripped-down, single-game Odyssey 100 console made the first home video game manufacturer look like a latecomer to the party. Plus, the company was still doing damage control from the days of the original Odyssey, with advertising material and even the boxes on store shelves assuring potential buyers that Odyssey 100 would work with “any TV…color or black & white.” Radio Shack and a toy manufacturer named Coleco joined the fray – and the first console war, such as it was, was on. The mid 1970s was awash with variations on Pong and other single-game consoles like Tank and Stunt Cycle, but if anyone aside from Atari emerged victorious, it was Coleco with its series of Telstar consoles.
Coleco designers, with help from Ralph Baer, had another ace up their sleeve: a console which could, like the Odyssey, play different games with interchangeable cartridges. Only this time, the cartridges themselves contained the games on the ROM chips, which would be read by the console hardware. Other competitors in the field also saw the writing on the wall and started aiming for programmability, with Atari abandoning its first such attempt, the Game Brain, in favor of a new console: model CX2600, the Atari Video Computer System.
Coleco would’ve gotten there first with the Telstar Arcade…if not for a 60-day dockworkers’ strike. A relative newcomer to the video game industry, Fairchild Instrument & Camera, made it first with the Channel F console. Using interchangeable cartridges resembling nothing so much as 8-track tapes, the Channel F could conceivably play new games for as long as Fairchild cared to create and sell them. Channel F, however, was short-lived, racking up a grand total of a little over a dozen individually-sold games. Atari’s VCS, also known as the Atari 2600, took the lead.
A locked-in number of game variations were out. The home video game cartridge – the concept of software – was in. Magnavox abandoned a 24-game dedicated console and launched a cartridge-based system called Odyssey 2. Mattel’s electronics division, having racked up millions in sales with the handheld, red-LED-screened Electronic Football handheld game, began R&D into a home video game console of its own. Channel F disappeared, as did RCA’s laughably underpowered, B&W-only console, Studio II. It was 1978. The real console wars had begun.
Console Wars
No matter what era of the industry, there have always been pitched marketing battles between major players on the field. Xbox vs. Playstation 2 vs. Gamecube is only the latest iteration of this constant in the video game business. In the late 80s and early 90s, Nintendo and Sega took fierce swipes at one another – and nearly missed the hints that Sony would soon be stepping into the ring with the Playstation, a powerful new game console which had started life as a CD-ROM peripheral for the Super Nintendo system. Before that, Colecovision and the Atari 5200 were vying for players’ attention…and before that Atari 2600 vs. Intellivision…and before that Atari’s Pong consoles jostled with numerous other Pong clones for market share.
It’s become a tradition, however, to name names in marketing warfare. The [Sega] “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” and “Nintendo is what Genesisn’t” slogans of the early 90s have a proud lineage dating back to the 70s. The first competitive video game commercial can be traced back to Coleco, a Connecticut toy company who launched a campaign comparing its new Head To Head Football game to Mattel’s popular Electronic Football. The ad took the form of a mock televised football game, with two players decked out not in pads, but gigantic foam suits resembling the respective handheld games. Mattel took note and later launched its own aggressive comparison campaign against Atari in 1980, when Mattel launched its Intellivision game console. George Plimpton, as curious a choice for spokesperson as he was, politely invited us to compare the two systems for ourselves, “feature for feature,” because nothing he could say would beat us seeing it for ourselves. Mattel cornered the video sports game market, attaching licenses to their games such as NFL Football and NBA Basketball, and when their advertisements showed Intellivision’s sports titles next to Atari’s notoriously underwhelming versions of the same sports, there really was no comparison. Atari responded in kind by launching a campaign in which a bespectacled youngster declared that Plimpton was wrong – who cared about sports games, when Atari had most of the hot arcade licenses tied up?
Prior to the Coleco/Mattel tussle and the all-out TV and print brawl waged by Mattel and Atari, advertising for video games had been fairly low-key, spending most of its airtime on the astonished faces of people supposedly playing the games and only sparingly showing the then-primitive graphics. The first-ever video game to be advertised on television anywhere in the world was Magnavox’s original Odyssey, demonstrated live in the middle of the Ol’ Blue Eyes Is Back comeback special by none other than Frank Sinatra himself. (Magnavox bankrolled the nationally televised concert, so it had enough pull to get even the Chairman of the Board to play video ping-pong on national TV.)
And here you thought George Plimpton was a classy, if unlikely, pitchman.
Coming up in part two: sex, violence, and controversy – think it started with Doom and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? Sorry, game over. Start again.