Odyssey Makes Its Entrance!
Winter Of 1972/73 -
Upgrading Odyssey
1973 - Rethinking My Act
And Now To 1974
1974
- I Become A Freelancer - And How Sanders Almost Got Into The Arcade VG
Manufacturing Business
Tracking Video Game
Activity In The Field
Back
To Living With Magnavox ... Also: WPI & Warner Cable
Interactive Video Systems
We Play
Cable Games ... 20 Years Ahead Of Our Time
Trying
To Get Magnavox Into The Arcade Video Game Business - And Super Odyssey
And Now To 1975
The AY3-8500 Chip Saga
The
Centronics/Gamex Interlude ... Beware The Mafia!
Monday Nite Football
Smile - You're On Camera!
Back to Magnavox ... 1975
History Redux
1976 - The Lawsuits Start
During the month of April, Magnavox put on simultaneous demonstrations of their 1972 product line for their dealers and for the press in many parts of the country. I was pleased to be invited to one of their product line introductions on the 22nd of the month. It took place at the Bowling Greene Restaurant in the middle of Central Park in New York City. I remember walking slowly across the park from the 5th Avenue side to reach the restaurant, still a little sore from my operation and limping a bit.
The Magnavox line that spring season included several new TV sets, a new color camera for personal use and, finally, Odyssey Model ITL-200. Sitting in the audience on folding chairs among dealers and reporters, it was obvious to me that the Odyssey game was the undisputed hit of the show! I was more than pleased and hard pressed to keep my mouth shut and keep from jumping up on the stage and yelling "That's my baby!"
With
a couple of weeks, Magnavox began supplying their dealers with production
units. They also started shipping a very nice looking pump action plastic "rifle", for which they provided a separate, large, in-store easel
display. And they supplied their dealers with six additional game packs
containing a game plug-in card and an overlay, instructions and other
goodies.
Unexpected problems soon began to haunt the program: First off, Magnavox featured Odyssey in their fall TV advertising in such a way that everyone got the impression that Odyssey would only work with Magnavox TV sets. Then they set the price at $100 for the game unit plus six program cards (which could play twelve different games using overlays). Finally, they charged another $25 for the rifle, which discouraged its sale.
Unfortunately, they mismanaged the sale of the six additional plug-in game packs. These featured some of the best games, such as Volleyball, Handball, Baseball, Wipe-Out, Invasion, and Fun Zoo. All those packs wound up under the store counters for after market sale ... but Magnavox evidently neglected to train sales personnel to "push" the packs so that very few of them were sold.
In spite of all of these marketing and
sales gaffes and with a little help from an ad campaign featuring Frank
Sinatra, Magnavox sold nearly 100,000 Odyssey ITL-200s that season ... Who
knows how many more would have moved off the shelves that season, or next,
if Magnavox would have had broader distribution ... at that time, only
"authorized" Magnavox dealerships could carry and sell the
product. It was a marketing set up Magnavox was forced to eliminate a
couple of years later, when they were sued by the government for restraint
of trade.
While I was watching the demonstration of the Odyssey game at Bowling Greene in New York, and during the May and June, other Odyssey demonstrations were taking place at Magnavox dealerships all over the country. One of these was open to dealers and invited public in Burlingame, California at the Airport Marina. On the 21st of May, Nolan Bushnell, later president of Atari, signed the visitors log and attended that demonstration. There he played an Odyssey unit hands-on ... including, of course, its ping-pong game.
Years later, during various depositions and in federal court, Mr. Bushnell would allow as how the Odyssey ping-pong game he had played in Burlingame wasn't very interesting. However, history proved otherwise: Shortly after that demo, Nolan Bushnell hired Alan Alcort from Amperex, where Bushnell had worked some years earlier. He put Alan to work on a coin operated arcade ping-pong game: Pong.
Alan Alcort had the freedom to build a game with some 100 integrated logic circuits - 7400 series T-squared L ICs, to be precise - a perfectly sensible way to go with a design for a coin-op machine costing many hundreds of dollars but a totally inaccessible route at the time for the home TV game designer. Alan Alcort did a great job, vastly improving on the basic ping-pong features of the Odyssey machine by providing a segmented paddle for vertical ball control (in place of Odyssey's "english" control), adding scoring and, most effectively, that pong sound that gave the game real life.
As just about everybody knows, Pong eventually became a great hit in the bars and arcades of America. That game can clearly be credited with starting the coin operated arcade video game industry with a bang! Video games, both of the home TV game variety and coin-op arcade video games were launched.
There is also no doubt in my mind that Pong helped Odyssey sales in 1972 ... after all, an Odyssey game system was the only way you could have at least some of the Pong experience at home. The rest, as they say, is (video game) history.
Let me hasten to say that Sander Associates - and my - involvement with video games, and interactive video systems in general, didn't stop there. In fact, it was just the beginning.
Winter Of 1972/73 - Upgrading Odyssey
Having suffered through the strengths and weaknesses of the Odyssey roll out and the machine's performance, I knew what I had do next: I had to do my utmost to help Magnavox add improvements to the product that would increase its appeal. The ultimate motive was, of course, to increase potential license income to Sanders from Magnavox so as to keep Sanders management happy.
In the ensuing winter months I spent after hours in my home lab working on improving Odyssey. Taking a leaf from Pong it was obvious that future Odyssey models would need sound and scoring. The latter seemed out of reach, pricewise, but sound was entirely feasible. I got busy and designed a small box that plugged into the Odyssey base unit, detected coincidence signals between the "ball" and "paddle" symbols and produced a "pong" like sound via a built-in speaker.
When the sound unit was completed, we showed it to Magnavox. The response was the first encounter with what was to become Magnavox' recurrent bouts of doubt about their future in the video game business. Nobody paid any real attention to my sound accessory ... Magnavox was busy selling off Odyssey inventory. Senior management was not certain whether there would be another production run of that product! I was not a happy camper!
That was only the first of a long string of disappointments with our Magnavox association. The next came when I showed them several novel games I had developed. The games were made possible by adding "active components", such as transistors and diodes, to Odyssey's presently" passive" plug-in programming cards. The added active components opened up game possibilities that the basic game circuitry and "old" card design could not handle. Again, my efforts were received with indifference at Fort Wayne. So much for trying to support our licensee!
An aside: In retrospect, the concept of plugging in a cartridge or card carrying active components to play a video game was absolutely novel. Had I then been as aware of the need for patenting concepts as I became in subsequent years, Sanders would have been able to obtain a patent that might have covered all ROM cartridges when they appeared some years later. A technical and legal case could certainly be made that ROM based plug-in carts for "programming" video games achieve their objective - presenting game graphics and controlling game flow - by using "active components" - their Read Only Memories (ROMs). When you get right down to it, a ROM is basically an integrated form of diode and transistor matrices.
License income from that invention could easily have dwarfed what we eventually realized from our basic game licenses and from litigating patent infringement law suits. These started in 1975 and continued off and on for the better part of twenty years. They ended up collecting about a hundred million dollars for Magnavox and Sanders ... and the lawyers, of course ... you can't win 'em all!
After my abortive attempts to peddle my sound unit and the "active" plug-in carts, I was reduced to calling Bob Fritsche frequently so I could keep track of what was happening in Fort Wayne in the video game group. What I heard mostly were sorry tales about selling off the remaining Odyssey inventory - and not much about work going on to come up with next generation designs. Bob Fritsche was fighting for a new product line but he wasn't getting much support from management.
I had begun tracking several semi-conductor houses, such as Texas Instrument (TI), MOSTechnology, General Instrument (GI) and others to determine the feasibility of using integrated circuit technology cost effectively for home TV games. I used Bob Fritsche as my go between to pass whatever I found out on to Magnavox management and engineering. In particular, the emergence of the P-MOS method for IC fabrication looked like the way to go for a system based on a few chips, or perhaps even a single chip. Clearly, that was the wave of the future. I certainly wasn't alone in that belief because it became evident in later years that the guys at Atari were thinking along the same line. Their single chip Pong home game for Sears would put them on the map to stay!
During the balance of 1973, I did not see much hope for Magnavox' success in the video game business. While I wasn't privy to all that was going on inside that company, I sure didn't get the feeling that Bob Fritsche, who was struggling to make something of his product area, was getting the support he needed from his management.
Meanwhile, I was occupied with upgrading the technical capabilities of Sanders' electro optics division. Much of my attention was focused on getting us into the crystal growing business so we could produce materials needed for military arc light pumped lasers. That effort, at least, turned out successfully. Within a year, we were growing usable quantities of yttrium lithium fluoride (YLF) crystals, building laser cavities to house them and getting them to oscillate, i. e. lase ... and we were successfully launched into the military laser business!
I wish I could have said that of the video game business.
I kept cogitating about ways to improve our chances for substantial license income from TV games. A memo I wrote to Dan Chisholm, Lou Etlinger and Herb Campman on March 18 sums up what I was thinking: I reiterated Magnavox' complete lack of effort in the sublicensing arena and recounted my frustration with their foot dragging in accepting my support. I specifically described my effort to get Magnavox to work with me on a single chip PMOS design that was by now more than feasible. Such a design would have given Magnavox an attractive package to present to future sub licensees, especially overseas. At least that was my opinion.
Magnavox resisted the thought of sub licensing ... they insisted that they did not want to generate competition for themselves. It was obvious that both Atari and others were going to develop the "video game" business whether they, Magnavox, liked it or not. I was fuming mad.
As it turned out, I was right, of course. The appearance of the GI AY3-8500 game chip changed all that within a year. Suddenly anybody could produce a high quality pong like video game for home use. With this new situation, the pressure to get a sub licensing program organized at Magnavox went up dramatically ... but I'm jumping ahead!
I further reported on Magnavox' dealings with TI on a chipset which basically imitated our Brown Box and Odyssey's discrete component designs. They included the sync circuits, the ball and paddle spot generators, as well as our summer, flip-flop and diode matrix subcircuit designs. Odyssey ITL-200 contained these subcircuits on separate small PC boards that plugged into a mother board. TI went one step further and integrated these subsystem modules on one chip.
In May, TI and Magnavox signed an agreement to have TI design and fabricate such a chip set, copying our circuitry, with Magnavox' help under a contract negotiated that month for multiple chip sets. They were to be used to produce the Model 100 game by Magnavox in 1975, a development spurred on by the inside knowledge of an impending Atari home video game.
TI promised delivery of that chip set for 01/75. Magnavox, finally getting up some steam, wanted a fall back position and went ahead with a discrete component design should TI fail to deliver. By the time August rolled around, Magnavox had received a proposal from National Semiconductor for a single chip, PMOS design for January or February 1975 delivery. There was a 30k to 40k design cost associated with this chip set and devices were estimated to cost $7 to $8 per chip.
Come August of '74, Bob Fritsche tells me that National Semi is "out", at least for now. Magnavox had decided to go with the design calling for the five TI chips "aping" our discrete component design ... talk about moving backwards. A single chip design was to follow later.
I knew I couldn't just hang around waiting for Magnavox to get off the dime. I had begun to spend more and more time away from my primary job in the electro optics division. My main focus was now directed at squeezing as much mileage out of our Magnavox licensing deal as possible. That wasn't going to happen without pushing the envelope every day of the week because Magnavox didn't seem to have a firm handle on the direction their future product line should take.
As I got more involved in pushing our licensing business with Magnavox, my level of participation in the electro optics division decreased by the day. Gene Rubin, the division's manager had been very supportive of what I was doing and so was Herb Campman. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that I should move into a staff position and pursue licensing and new TV game product development full time. Both Harold Pope and Sandy agreed that his seemed to make sense.
On paper, I was now assigned the Herb Campman's corporate I R&D office. That was a mere pro forma arrangement. I had to belong somewhere organizationally, so that was as good a place as any. I worked closely with Herb on whom I depended for funding. Lou Etlinger, our corporate director of patents, and Dick Seligman, one of Lou's two patent lawyers were additional, close associates.
Dick wrote all of the many patents which would apply for over the next ten or fifteen years. Most of them issued. We had a very high success rate. Dick and I also frequently traveled to the US patent & trademark offices at Crystal City in Washington, D.C. to argue our case in person after we received the usual office actions denying everything.
On one notable occasion, we went to see
Richard Murray, the primary examiner of several of my patents. The subject
was an office action regarding the initial application of what would
become the '480 patent. I had brought along a 12" B&W TV set and
one of our early ping-pong game units. While Dick Seligman argued with the
examiner over details of the claims, I blithely set up the TV set and the
game and started up the ping-pong game. When we first came into the office,
the examiner had rejected the idea of a demo out of hand ... 't wasn't done!
Once the unit was playing there was no way he could keep from peeking at
it. Half an hour later, Murray and half a dozen examiners from down the
hall were in the room watching Dick and I play ping-pong. The '480 patent
issued on 22 March of 1971. It is the pioneer patent of the video game industry.
At Sanders, to keep hardware and, eventually, software development moving forward as we saw the need for it, I had to acquire at least one technician and an engineer for a start. Bill Harrison came back onboard. I interviewed a few young engineers from within the company and settled on Leonard Cope, a University of Main and Yale graduate who was not particularly happy with his work in the program group to which he was assigned. Neither was the program manager. Lenny was a maverick.
What Lenny needed was motivation. We developed a great working relationship and he never looked back for a second. He turned out to be an exact match for what I needed ... he had the digital circuit design experience which I lacked and he was a good programmer. That would come in handy as we pursued dozens of video game and interactive video concepts over the next half decade. Lenny also became my right hand man in my professional "non-Sanders" life with Marvin Glass and Associates whose outside electronic toy and game developer I became in 1977. Just for starters, Lenny did the software for "Simon" - the most successful handheld single chip microprocessor game of the Eighties. It's still in the stores in 2000+.
Tracking Video Game Activity In The Field
In the spring of 1974 I had attended an Music Operators of America show of coin-op/arcade games in Chicago. It was the first of many MOA shows which I would attend over the years. The object was to collect information on infringing games, which is exactly what I did. I would look at, or play whatever games were accessible and then make detailed notes from memory while ducking inconspicuously behind a column away from the display area ... I felt like a gum shoe but it was fun and I got the information we were looking for! That data was later passed along to Magnavox. I considered this activity to be part of my continuing attempts to get them off their duff and finally start going after infringers in a serious way.
When I came back from the MOA show, Royden Sanders, our president, asked for a briefing. After finishing my verbal report, I ran through some of the arcade video game business numbers for him. That prompted him to ask me something like: "Why aren't we in that business if it's so lucrative?". Since this meant getting into the commercial product manufacturing business about which Sanders knew zip, I ducked and I weaved but to no avail. Obviously couldn't avoid coming up with a detailed answer to Sandy's question. So I did.
I sat down and generated a preliminary paper design of a coin-op machine. That design used what we had come to call Rusch's "de/dt" velocity sensitive circuit functions (de/dt being the derivative of the change in voltage with respect to time) ... methods for controlling the motion of the ball in a hockey game, for example, which gave the puck realistic velocity - and direction - control. Bill Harrison and I had built an attachment to the Brown Box in 1968 which demonstrated the power of that method. We were able to play a very realistic hockey game back then which was far superior to arcade games that came on the market as much as 7 or 8 years later.
In addition to the design, I came up with a business plan for producing what we later called our Skate-N-Score and our Pro-Soccer arcade games. I was half hoping that would put an end to this trail. Instead, the plan turned out persuasive enough to get a go ahead from Sandy. Some initial funding came from Herb Campman's R&D office, and about $50k was kicked in by Gene Rubin out of some kitty he had for R&D. He just liked the idea of Sanders doing something out of the ordinary with a fair chance of success. Gene was a gutsy guy ... a lot of us thought that he should have become president of Sanders in the 1980s but never got the chance.
I gathered a group of engineers and technicians in a fair sized lab room located in the rear mill building behind the main Canal Street building. There we designed two versions of sports games. Within a few months we finished building ten complete arcade games, five of each type. All of the electronics were located on a single, one foot square PC board. That was attached to the inside of the hinged door. When you opened up the door, the whole works was in front of you, readily accessible for servicing along with the coin mechanism box. It was a good design and played like gang busters. While on test at an arcade location in New Hampshire it beat most other Atari and Midway coin-op games there by a factor of 2 to 1 ... not too shabby! This looked promising.
Then the fun began at Sanders: I made appropriate demos to Sandy and others and presented my latest, detailed business plan on how to get into the arcade game business. One component of my presentation was the request to set up shop in a small, nearly empty building we owned about a mile distant from our Canal Street facility, right off the Everitt Parkway and Route 101 in Nashua. A second component was my stipulation that nobody from Sanders military operation be transferred or have anything to do with this proposed consumer products operation. Having lived on both sides of the fence - in consumer product manufacturing and defense electronics - I knew only too well how incompatible these two activities are. I wanted to hire a new crew from scratch.
That proposal seemed to cast a pall over the whole project ... but I was insistent: We could not afford to have Sanders gold plated military production methods and personnel associated with this venture ... it was a different animal.
The typical big company scenario evolved: Instead of making a decision, management gave me some unasked for and successively higher powered accounting type help to produce several additional versions of increasingly fancy business plans. The end result was predictable: The whole thing just went away quietly. For better or for worse ... we'll never know.
A couple of years later I had my tech build me one of our Skate-N-Score boards into a large wooden box with four joysticks for two or four player game playing. We displayed this hockey game on a 6 foot wide Kloss front projection TV screen ... what a great game that was! I took the game unit home to my basement lab along with the Kloss projection TV set and it stayed there for a few months. We played it with the kids and visiting friends. For its time, it was an exciting multiplayer sports game!
Back To Living With Magnavox ... Also: WPI & Warner Cable
In September of '74 I wrote a memo to Dan Chisholm, a Sanders VP. By now, Dan had been assigned the job of Sanders' corporate management anchor for keeping track of what was going on in our various video game activities. My report covered Magnavox' current sales, as best I knew the details. I also projected license income from Magnavox' single chip game system for '75.
That same memo further covered a report on the success of our Skate-N-Score machines during market tests in that NH arcade, and my recent demonstrations of Interactive Video systems based on video tape. This memo obviously predated the aborting of our arcade game venture.
Years earlier I had developed ways of interacting with videotaped presentations (or over the air and cable programs, for that matter). They allowed the viewer to take part in quiz shows and get immediate feedback after making a choice of one of multiple answers. Optical codes displayed on the picture tube and picked off by the player with a photosensitive light pen were the secret of these systems.
Magnavox had never shown any interest in this coded spot type of multiple choice games which we demonstrated as early as 1966. Throughout 1973 and 74 Bill Harrison and I had been busy further developing this interactive technology. I saw it as a way to produce effective, interactive training for both military and industrial/consumer applications.
In order to make a representative "encoded" video tape demonstration, we went to Worcester Polytechnic Institute - the same WPI which my son James would attend and graduate from years later with a physics major. There we got together with two graduate students whom we persuaded to make this demo into the centerpiece of their final dissertation. I am not sure whether we actually coined the term interactive video but that's what we were pioneering. We loaned them the hardware which Bill and I had built to "annotate" and "encode" existing video tape footage with coded spots. The equipment allowed them to add interactive quiz features to existing or new tutorial video tapes, changing them from passive viewing to user interaction. The students decided to do their own video tape production. I still have a copy of it ... it's in B&W half inch, open reel format ... in common use before 3/4" U-Matic and 1/2" Betamax and VHS formats came into existence.
Annotating existing video footage to make
it interactive was to occupy my interest and energy off and on for the
next 25 years. In the late 1990s the optical data extraction method was
resurrected by Interactive Learning Group (ILG) in Minneapolis. They had
developed it for an interactive preschooler video tape based system
called Video Buddy, i. e. they had reinvented the method ... only they
couldn't get it to work reliably. Clark Johnson, a physics type consultant
and an old friend of mine became aware of their problems and told them to
come and see me for technical help. They met with me and Bob Pelovitz in
my Manchester lab and I became their technical consultant along with Bob,
my former sidekick at Sanders and now an independent engineering consultant like myself. We fixed ILG's technical problem, took a piece of
the action and got deeply involved in this modern revival of that old
technique of mine. Video Buddy first began to fill the shelves in
Minnesota early in 2000. Sales started of well.
We Play Cable Games ... 20 Years Ahead Of Our Time
As I said, in 1974, try as I might, I couldn't get Magnavox to show any interest in this interactive video quiz game and video teaching system. So we went on to try and peddle it elsewhere. One obvious candidate was once again the cable TV industry. I concentrated on the Warner Cable Company and made a number of presentations to get them to use what we now called our video annotation system. Eventually, I was able to get into an arrangement with a Malden, Massachussetts Warner Cable system operator to put interactive video games on their cable on a technical trial basis.
First, Bill Harrison and I modified an ordinary Odyssey game for use at the viewing end of the cable - at home. Then we built a spot generator unit for Warner that allowed them to overlay randomly moving "player spots" on a camera generated, color videographics background of a soccer field. At the receiving end in the home, the modified Odyssey unit now displayed its own player spots on top of the received cable picture of the soccer field, along with the transmitted player spots. That gave us an attractive view of the playing field with four or six player spots. The neatest thing was that the remotely generated, randomly moving "soccer player" spots sent to us over the cable were just as capable of intercepting and reversing or forwarding the ball as the manually controlled "soccer player" spots coming from our Odyssey game unit. Some of those spots always seemed to be at just the right place.
Bill Harrison and I put that test on the cable late one evening and it worked like a charm. We were pleased with the way it all worked and got home very late that night. On the way we stopped off at a diner for some fast food and ruminated on our work and life in general: We were practically free agents, working out of a big company, assured of a paycheck every month, doing our own thing with virtually total freedom from the usual nonsense attendant to a normal job. We knew how unusual this arrangement was and we felt very fortunate. We also knew that we had to produce results to keep this desirable situation going ad infinitum.
Interactive video became our "religion". We spent the next several years trying to make interactive video cable games into a commercial reality. That was to prove to be a much more difficult job than coming up with neat concepts and building demo hardware to show them off!
As I've mentioned before, when talking about the scheme of things, I tell everyone who wants to listen that inventing something is easy; doing hardware and software design to make it work is also relatively easy ... selling or licensing the darned stuff ... that's the hard part. No wonder the marketers of this world drive Cadillacs and the engineers come to work in their Chevies and Fords.
Trying To Get Magnavox Into The Arcade Video Game Business - And Super Odyssey
At the same time (1974), Bob Fritsche at the Magnavox end and I from my Sanders base were in frequent contact. Now that I had the charter and the time to go wherever my licensing support activities led me, I kept using Bob as my point man. I needed him to exercise some influence over future Magnavox video game product programs, the only way I saw that would keep the license income stream flowing, short of developing a string of sublicenses.
Fritsche called me on October 1st to arrange for a visit at Sanders. Having failed to sell my own management on setting up a separate arcade game operation for Sanders, the new objective was to try and get Magnavox into the video arcade game manufacturing business. Everything was in place for that move: We had two completely engineered games, our Skate-N-Score and Pro-Soccer designs. And we had all the documentation needed to put them into production.
In addition to that subject, I also wanted to discuss a potential product which was something that Bob Fritsche had been noodling around in his head. He called it "Super Odyssey" - a home game that would be able to play the S-N-S velocity controlled "de/dt" sports games.
Early November of 1974, Fritsche and I went over details of what it would take to lower the cost of his "Super Odyssey" game. Bob came to Nashua on the 12th of the month. With him were Bob Price and John Slusarsky, both from Magnavox' video game engineering group. We demonstrated our two arcade games to them. They worked so well and they were so completely production engineered that everybody got quite excited about moving forward with dispatch. Having Magnavox take over the production and distribution of our Skate-N-Score and Pro-Soccer arcade games seemed to make a lot of sense to both parties.
But it was a "Super Odyssey" having some or all of the capabilities of our Skate-N-Score games that really had turned on Bob Fritsche. While he was still visiting with us, he spent some time doing an estimate what Magnavox' cost would likely be for such a home game product. He thought that a sales base of 3,500 to 4,000 units was a reasonable number. He figured that he might be able to work through Magnavox' exclusive distribution chain. Based on that quantity, he came up with a price of $424 for the product. The game would contain a built-in 17" TV set and would be housed either in an armoire type cabinet or one of the low floor consoles of their deluxe TV set line. Our three visitors left for Fort Wayne the next day, apparently all fired up with that concept. Personally, I was not enthusiastic about the direction into which our discussion had moved.
I had my doubts about a consumer product with a PC board of the complexity and cost of our S-N-S games. Instead, I plugged for an updated Odyssey version instead. On the one hand, I was hopeful of salvaging our arcade game effort. On the other hand, I was just glad to see some momentum coming into in Magnavox' video game planning. Either way, things looked promising for us. Hope springs eternal but the feeling usually doesn't last long ... it didn't.
Fritsche called and reported to me on the 21st that the decision on whether to go ahead with either scheme was mired in internal management politics. For starters, Bob arranged for a meeting in Fort Wayne after Thanksgiving - on the 26th and 27th of November - with Nat Adams, the General Manager, to sort things out. I began to get the feeling that I better not hold my breath in anticipation of great decisions from Magnavox.
On the same day, I wound up having a somewhat heated argument on the phone with Tom Briody, Magnavox' chief patent counsel in Fort Wayne. He called to question the legality and admissibility of the coin-op venture Fritsche and I were talking about, at least under the present Sanders-Magnavox license agreement. I told Tom to leave that to Bob Fritsche and me ... and later that day attempted to reach Nat Adams to try to end run any obstructionism from their legal department. As it turned out, there was no need for a confrontation. Tom Briody and I eventually became good friends. He would become the sparkplug for Magnavox' successful licensing program.
In that same month, November of '74, Philips and later Magnavox announced the arrival of their 12" video disc players. I had been eyeing them for awhile because, in my mind, their random branching capabilities made them the natural successors to video tape players for interactive video training, education and game systems. Consequently, I started bugging Magnavox for a sample unit and began involving Bob Fritsche in related discussions.
Magnavox was not completely asleep at the wheel, fortunately. Early in '75 they had started producing a new unit, their Model 200. It used the same TI chip set as the new Model 100 but with an additional TI chip that allowed it to play "Smash".
In February, National Semiconductor entered the UK market with a 3 game IC design retailing at about $85 US equivalent.
Early in March, I drove down to General Instruments' Hicksville, Long Island plant at Ed Sack's invitation. He was the general manager there. I was shown a preview of GI's AY3-8500 multi game single chip video game ... the chip that would dominate home video game designs for the next several years all across the globe. That chip had been clandestinely designed by two freelancing engineers at G.I.'s Glen Rothes' operation in Scotland. Ed Sacks got wind of it and had the Scottish engineers sent to Hicksville to demonstrate their device and to test the water for interest by US toy and game manufacturers. The engineers never went "home" again.
I got a demo, played the games and got pretty excited about the possibilities. To me, the performance of that chip was so impressive that I called Arnold Greenberg, president of Coleco. He had expressed to me a desire to get into the video game business sometime earlier, probably during a meeting at Marvin Glass & Associates in Chicago. I told Arnold to get himself or someone else down to GI as soon as possible ... he did and Coleco became the first company to place a major order for AY3-8500 chips.That would eventually wind up in Coleco's first and wildly successful Telstar product.
On the 19th of March I sent Bob Fritsche a letter that proposed that we work together on video games making use of Magnavox' video disc player. I suggested that he come and view demonstrations in which we had emulated the video disc by using video tape source material. In that demo we showed a soccer game with background and goalies on tape (similar to the Warner Cable demos). Other players were generated by the game unit and interacted normally with those coming from the surrogate disc source. The result was a complex playing field with lots of action. We discussed a possible '77 - '78 time frame for a real product based on these concepts. We should be so lucky!
Referring back to the chip set made by TI for Magnavox, I sent a memo to Dan Chisholm and Lou Etlinger on March 21 that said, in effect: "Watch out for TI to sell their TV game chip set to all comers ... it will happen" (and it did!). TI had already made up data sheets for all five IC's. Also, I warned Sanders' management that National Semi was going to go it alone with their chip ... all cause for laying legal notices on both of them to take a license or cease and desist. I urged Lou and Dan to put pressure on Magnavox, preferably above the Tom Briody level, to get serious about pursuing licensees and infringers alike.
RCA was also moving into the arena with their microprocessor based Spectra game ... same licensing problem ... and ditto for Fairchild's Channel F, the first microprocessor game to appear on the market that was programmable by changing plug-in cartridges containing ROM with game specific code.
In April I heard that GI was visiting Magnavox, Fort Wayne to demo their AY3-8500 chip. I also heard that a color Odyssey unit was in the works for '76. Things were finally looking up on the Magnavox manufacturing front and with it our direct license income ... but all was still dead in the water on the sub licensing front.
Fritsche et al still hadn't come to Nashua for the vidisc based game demo. Late in May we tried to get John Slusarsky to come and discuss Magnavox' interest in our video quiz and audio tape player controlled video game concepts and demo systems, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, Bob Fritsche had actually been at Philips in Holland at their head shed in Eindhoven for a meeting regarding the use of video discs in video games. He reported that there had been some interest. He also told us to expect his visit along with John Slusarsky to go over that subject. While we were at it, we also talked about the need for legal action against National Semi ... finally I was getting some interest in that subject from someone within Magnavox, though not necessarily very effective support. I also tried to bum a Magnavox 13" color chassis from Bob Fritsche for use with a 21 game unit we were designing for Centronix/Gamex for Las Vegas scene. Don't remember if I succeeded.
But that's another story entirely! Here it is in a nutshell:
The Centronics/Gamex Interlude ... Beware The Mafia!
Late in January 1975, I am sitting at my desk in our video game development lab at Sanders, having just recently returned from an MOA show in Chicago. In the late afternoon the phone rings: At the other end is the president of Centronics, Bob Howard.
Now, Centronics was then - and was for many years afterwards - a household word in the nascent computer printer business. Centronics had a substantial, modern plant in Hudson, New Hampshire, where they assembled large quantities of printers. Their basic engines (printer mechanisms) were imported from Japan but Centronics developed and fabricated all of the electronics needed to interface printers and computers efficiently. Their engineers created the Centronics interface hardware, connector and software standards that are in use to this day. They were running a very successful operation. Conveniently for me, that plant was no more than about five miles from my Canal Street office in Nashua.
Bob Howard told me that he had just returned from England where he had attended a video arcade game show. When he got back, he had his lawyers look into who owned patents in that business, because he had a specific interest in the subject. His lawyers told him call down the street because a quick search of the patent files brought up Sanders/Baer, Baer, Baer et al in all the relevant patents. "Could I come to his office the next morning?" - "Of course, I'll be there with bells on bright and early!"
When I showed up at Centronics the next morning, I learned from Bob Howard that the company was also involved in a small subsidiary apply named Gamex. That company's objective was to introduce electronics, specifically computer controlled games into Las Vegas. Bob Howard informed me that he wanted to build an all electronic "21" machine for a start. Would Sanders be interested in extending the necessary licenses and would we help design this machine? The answer was, naturally, yes, we would.
The next day, Lenny Cope and I went back to Centronics to meet with several of their engineers and discussed the details of the machine they were looking for. Then we wrote a proposal, submitted it and in short order, got the job of doing the display portion of the game. Bingo! We were in the video game consulting engineering business.
To keep the cost down, we designed the game around a 12" B&W monitor and used a transparent vinyl color overlay to create the illusion of a full color presentation. That worked out very well. Several engineers at Centronics designed the software that responded to the player button presses and interfaced with our display hardware. The result was a slick machine that played flawlessly, had the required adjustability of the odds for use by the casino operators and was potentially cheaper and far more reliable that its mechanical counterpart.
Later in 1975, Bob Howard extended our contract to cover the design of a horse racing game. Again Lenny Cope and I designed the graphics portion of the job. What the player saw was a perspective view of the race track as from a camera above and to the side of the straightaway. Animated horses ran from left to right, with a picket fence zipping by behind them. We allowed the player to make his horse change lanes and to try and affect the outcome of the race by squeezing out other horses. There was a toteboard showing the horses' numbers, the odds, bets and the winner. It all looked very realistic and might have become an exciting game except for a minor glitch.
Early in 1976, just about the time we finished the first pass of the graphic display hardware for "Photofinish", we got the word from Centronics to stop all work! It seemed that certain (Mafia?) elements in the gambling business let it be known that Gamex was to "get the hell out of this business!". The next thing we knew, the lead engineer at Centronics on the Gamex project was leaving the company; he was moving to Bally in Chicago. A set of drawings, schematics, the hardware and all the code that had been written for the two games presumably went with him.
That appeared to be the end of our foray into the gambling world.
Years later, in the mid Eighties, I would engineer an arrangement between Sanders and Marvin Glass and Associates (the US' best known independent toy and game designers in Chicago) which allowed us to get together on the design of a two player video game which we called "Monday Nite Football". That effort had a Mafia sequel, too.
The game was unusual in concept: Basically, before the action started on the football field, each gamer would decide on the paths to be taken by his quarterback, receiver and other players. The player would use a special function keyboard to enter his movement choices. When the Hike button was pushed, the action began as preplanned. After that point in time, each player had the option of over controlling his pre-programmed team members to correct for new situations resulting from the real time interaction of the two teams. For example, he could move the receiver so as to increase his chance of a successful catch. Similarly, the opponent could influence the possibility of an intercept if that presented itself in real time.
Monday Nite Football was unique and played like a charm. The Marvin Glass people - mainly Howard Morrison - decided that Bally would be a likely candidate to take an arcade license for the game. So we packed up our demo system, trucked it to Chicago and went to see Bally with Howard.
Howard Morrison, one of Marvin Glass' partners and I ran the demo; we found ourselves surrounded by a half dozen glum looking Bally characters. Try as we might, we could not get any reaction out of them, one way or the other ... a collection of poker faces!
Eventually, they left the room and caucused elsewhere. When they returned to the demo room, their verdict was "Thumbs down"! It was disappointing but frankly, I was glad to get the hell out of there! What a creepy bunch they were!
Years later, Chicago located Bally Midway turned into a very professionally run video arcade game company. In 1985 we had better luck licensing them under my patents for a game system which uses a TV camera to take a picture of the player's face for use in the game and in the score credits. I had come up with that idea and built a simple demo. When I had that working well, I took it to Chicago.
Howard Morrison invited John Peserb, one time major league baseball player and now chief engineer at Bally Midway. He came to look at my demo at Marvin Glass' impressive studios on North LaSalle Street. The demo went off fine. John liked the concept and immediately began to negotiate for a license.
I went home to New Hampshire and designed and built another, more complex board full of TTL IC logic to implement the concept more completely. I wanted to do a better job of digitizing faces - specifically, to provider higher resolution and gray scale. When I had it working well, I shipped that board to John Peserb and Bally's own engineers took it from there. A year later I got the board back and converted it to a scanner for passport size photos. Never waste a nice piece of electronics.
Once Glass and Bally had programmed a game using the camera concept, the machine went on trial at a Chicago arcade where it started out working well. Within a day, however, some idiot got up on a chair, dropped his pants in front of the camera ... and that was the end of the concept of using a TV camera in a coin-op game ... it takes all kinds to make a world.
During the months of May and June of 1975, Bob Fritsche and I were on the phone frequently to sort out what we could realistically expect to do together. Fritsche went off to Philips headquarters at Eindhoven in June for a second meeting regarding video disc players. He again brought up the relationship between video games and video discs which I had been harping on at length but apparently did not make a great impression on the Dutchmen.
When Bob came back from Holland, we set up a meeting for July 7th. John Kinney, an engineer at Philips Bryar Cliff Manor, NY was supposed to join Bob and John Slusarsky on that trip. George was responsible for special applications of the Philips video disc system. The visit never came off. The excuse was that Magnavox/Philips could not "chase all the options that were out there". That was the type of thinking that eventually scuttled video disc as a mass market product ... no imagination!
I finally flew out for another meeting with Magnavox in Fort Wayne on August 13th. This time it was John D'Aiuto, John Slusarsky and Bob Price who met me and professed continued interest in Sanders support.. The subjects I wanted to discuss covered these topics: A video disc/video game program, a video game built into a TV set top remote control unit such as those made by Jerrold popular at the time, a cocktail table for coin-op use, and a home use cocktail table game. We wound up talking mostly about the need for one on one games rather that the two player games then predominant. The bottom line was that we, Sanders, would help the Fort Wayne crew come up with better one on one games. Talk about changing the subject ...!
While I was in Fort Wayne, I saw their Model 100 2 game leader model for 1975 and the Model 33, a 3 game unit which had sound and scoring. I thought the products looked very good. At least that was encouraging! The memo of 13 August 1975 summarizes all of this.
Now, it should be clear that the 1972 Odyssey ITL-200 game unit was a production version of our "Brown Box", the switch programmable video game system which we had built at Sanders in 1967/68. Atari's Pong game, on the other hand, was a knock-off of the Odyssey unit's ping-pong game. As noted above, Nolan Bushnell played that game hands-on at the Burlingame, CA Magnavox dealership's open house in May of 1972. His engineer, Alan Alcort did a great job designing Pong with its 100 or so (TTL) integrated circuits located on a one foot square printed circuit board ... ok for a coin-op machine, but out of the question pricewise for a home game.
In subsequent years, it would increasingly bug me to hear Nolan Bushnell referred to as the "father" of all video games. He certainly deserves to be recognized as the "father of the arcade video game industry". The father of video games was and is yours truly. Meanwhile, Sanders and Magnavox had started to go after the infringers of our various video game patents, including Atari, Nolan Bushnell's company. On the stand, in court, in depositions Nolan had to admit to the facts. That didn't change what he said in public. That continued to tick me off. But as I've mentioned, the lawyers told me to cool it.
Atari was joined in a suit vs Chicago Dynamics laid on them by Magnavox. In June of 1976 court proceedings started at Federal Court in Chicago, judge John Grady presiding. I had the dubious pleasure of being on the stand from 6/2 to 6/10, day after day, as a fact witness. Spread out before me were all of the game hardware units we had built at Sanders between 1966 and 1969 as well as a 5 foot stack of documents: Mostly Harrison's, Rusch's and my daily logs and assorted technical loose notes.
The judge was very interested in the subject. He was a big, youngish football player type who had just recently left private law practice. He was very sharp and amazed all of us with the amount technical detail he absorbed and digested during the trial. He was also very friendly and often turned to me from the bench while I was on the witness stand and asked for explanations of some technical detail that had escaped him. I was impressed. One day the opposition brought an arcade Pong type game into the court room. When the judge asked that the back be removed so that he could see what's inside, there was a modified Admiral TV set (with its RF front end bypassed to make it effectively into a TV monitor, which I had described in my '480 patent). Judge Grady took one look at that and drew the proper conclusions ... same thing our patents had disclosed years earlier.
After weeks of intensive proceedings in that Chicago court room, the trial ended with Judge Grady's judgment in favor of Magnavox on all counts. The judge read his decision from the bench on January 10 of 1977. If we had written it ourselves, it could not have been more favorable ... we had won in a big way!
Naturally, I was pleased to hear him state unequivocally that my '480 patent was the "pioneer patent" of the nascent video game industry. The written record of the decision also reiterates that statement. US patent 3,728,480 entitled "Television Gaming And Training Apparatus" is and remains the pioneering patent of the video game art.
Nolan Bushnell was having second thoughts at the beginning of this trial. On June first of '76, he had a meeting with Tom Briody, Magnavox' chief patent counsel who had come in from Fort Wayne, Indiana to attend the Chicago-Dynamics trial in which Atari was also joined. Tom was with Ted Anderson, Esq., a senior patent lawyer and partner at Neuman Williams, Anderson and Olson of Chicago, Magnavox' outside lawyers handling all video game litigation. As told to me by Tom Briody a few days later:
* NB/Atari are "anxious" for
settlement.
* NB now feels that Magnavox' (licensing) umbrella could help
keep out pirates
* NB is worried about standard Pong business being killed
by too many competitive entries
* NB feels Coleco is in market this year
only (Coleco's Telstar game was "hot" that year - and they
stayed
in the video game business for several more successful years
- so NB
got that wrong!)
* NB drew an extensive marketing picture for Tom Briody
and Ted Anderson:
* Software and hardware programmable TV/video games
*
Games that are add-ons (PC cards etc. with chips) to calculators, maybe
other devices
* Sees all games becoming microprocessor controlled (he was
right!) - Atari was already working on what
would eventually become the
VCS 2600.
Bottom line: Nolan Bushnell/Atari settled with Magnavox. Atari got a low cost paid up license which also covered past infringement for US sold products, but no foreign rights. Those were negotiated five years later. That initial agreement was dated June 6, 1976. It was the first of two agreements. The second one was signed in 1981. It called for the exchange of technical data between Magnavox and Atari in the course of which Atari turned over some of the details on the VCS 2600 to Magnavox. Atari also paid royalties on coin-op games and cartridges which infringed our patents. By 1980, these royalties had exceeded three million dollars.
Taking that initial license in 1976 instantly made Nolan into a licensee ... a client of sorts. One doesn't go around knocking clients. So for years I kept my mouth shut while Nolan Bushnell was constantly getting his handsome face in front of the cameras and repeated the claim to the press, insisting that he be treated as the great "inventor" of video games. Maybe he was just doing his job ... but, naturally, it kept bugging me.
The Chicago-Dynamics et al lawsuit was just the first one in a series of legal actions against infringers of our patents. That series ran longer than any Broadway play ever did. In fact, it wasn't until 1998, long after all of the patents had expired, that the last of the lawsuits was settled for past infringement. This last action was directed against two arcade game manufacturers, Data East and Taito. I was deposed once again in August of 1997 with Ted Anderson also present. Some more money changed hands and went into the coffers of Sanders/Lockheed and Magnavox, of course - not mine, unfortunately. For me, that deposition was like old home week: Same questions, same hardware in evidence, same documents I had dealt with a decade earlier ... piece of cake! - It all felt like déja vue.
Even after all those years, all I had to do was to flip on the Power switch and my gold old Brown Box worked like a champ. It does need an occasional new set of AA batteries, but that's all that's needed to make it work. The gun worked too, but it was rarely part of the lawsuits.
Talking about the Brown Box and the gun: In 1999 I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the Classic Gaming Expo in Las Vegas. I demonstrated the Brown Box there and it worked as advertised to the delight of the attendees. Members of the audience played ping-pong, handball and volleyball with me and fired the "gun" at the target spot. It was the hit of the show.
Back to the subject of lawsuits: Over a period of ten years starting with the Chicago-Dynamic lawsuit in 1976-77 I was frequently called on to support the lawyers in a succession of lawsuits laid on companies such as Mattel and Activision - and later, on Nintendo and Sega. The end of the trail was a suit vs a couple arcade game manufacturers, Data East and Taito, as I mentioned above. Frequently, the lawyers would commandeer me on short notice for a week or more and I didn't get to see my home or my Sanders office for awhile. Throughout, our legal team was headed by Ted Anderson, Esq. of Neuman-William's, then a large Chicago intellectual property law firm. Assisting him was Jim Williams, Esq. until the early Eighties, when he left the Neuman-Williams to join a big lawfirm in New York.
On the opposing side were a succession of sharp lawyers - some pleasant, some otherwise - all of whom tried give me and our other friendly witnesses a hard time. As a fact witness, I spent as much as a week on the stand, day after day, going through those mountainous Sanders' documents, answering detailed questions about the various pieces of 1966-69 game hardware that we trucked with us all over the country and had spread out on tables in front of the judge's bench. The Brown Box made dozens of court appearances. Occasionally, some wire or component would fall off during all this moving around. I would spend the next lunch break of the court rushing off to Radio Shack to buy soldering equipment and tools. Back in the courtroom, I would troubleshoot and fix my game unit, often just in time to beat the judge's re-appearance after the break. That scenario was repeated several times in Chicago, then in San Francisco, Ottawa and New York, as best I remember ... those were tense moments.
The bottom line is this: We won every one of those lawsuits. They all went to appeal, there we won again and the better part of a hundred million dollars changed hands over the years. That was split 50/50 between Magnavox (later Philips) and Sanders (later Sanders/Lockheed) after paying the lawfirm, first Neumann Williams and later, Leydic-Voight after Ted Anderson moved there from Neuman-Williams in the 1990s when Neuman-Williams closed down the company.
Once we won that first lawsuit - the '76 suit which Nolan Bushnell decided to leave in favor of an Agreement - we had a formula that no adversary seemed to be able to break: If a game had "hit" and "hitting" symbols, it infringed. That meant that any game or cartridge in which a machine controlled screen symbol changed its direction or was otherwise affected by an intercept with a manually controlled symbol ... it infringed! Period! We never lost a suit after that for the better part of twenty years.
© Copyright 1999-2000 by Ralph H. Baer
Erstellt am 03.09.01. Zuletzt bearbeitet am 08.09.03 .