The SIMON Story by Ralph H. Baer
Students of video game history know that the 1972 season saw the introduction of Magnavox’ Odyssey Video Game system in May and the first appearace of Nolan Bushnell’s "Pong" coin-op machine. Now, Odyssey was a production version of our “Brown Box” programmable video game system which we had built at Sanders in 1969. "Pong", on the other hand, was a knock-off of the Odyssey unit’s ping-pong game ... Nolan Bushnell played that game hands-on in May of 1972 at a Magnavox dealership’s open-house in Burlingame, California. In subsequent years, it would increasingly bug me to hear Nolan referred to as the “inventor” of video games ... it’s pretty clear who that is, namely me. Meanwhile, Sanders and Magnavox had started to go after the infringers of our various video game patents, including Atari, Nolan’s company. Atari was joined in a suit vs. Chicago Dynamics laid on them by Magnavox. Court proceedings started in Federal Court in Chicago, Judge Grady presiding, in June of 1976. I had the dubious pleasure of being on the stand from 6/2 to 6/10, as a fact witness. Spread out before me were all of the game hardware we had built at Sanders between 1966 and 1969 as well as a stack of documents: Harrison’s, Rusch’s and my daily logs and assorted technical loose notes. There was little doubt as to who did what and when based on the evidence of all that material. After weeks of intensive activity in court, the trial ended with Judge Grady’s judgment in favor of Magnavox on all counts. The judge read his decision from the bench on Jan 10 of 1977. If we had writtent it ourselves, it could not have been more favorable ... we won in a big way! Nolan had had second thoughts by this time. On June first of ‘76, he had a meeting Tom Briody, Magnavox’ Chief Patent Counsel from Ft.Wayne, Indiana and with Ted Anderson, Esq. of Newman, Williams, Anderson and Olson of Chicago, Magnavox’ outside lawyers handling all Video Game litigation. As told to me by Tom Briody: * NB/Atari “anxious” for settlement. Bottom line: Nolan/Atari settled with Magnavox. They got a paid-up license covering all forms of video-games for what, in retrospect, turned out to be a a ludicrously low figure: A hundred grand. But then, who could anticipate in 1976 how much the TV Game (now called Video Game) industry would grow in just a few more years! Taking that license 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 when Nolan was getting his face in front the cameras and into the press, acting like the great “inventor”of video games. Just the same, that situation rankled and I was still ticked off in 1976 when, once again, I was in Chicago attending an MOA (Music Operators of America) show of coin-op devices. I went to these shows routinely on Sanders’ and Magnavox’ behalf to check on the presence of games that might infringe our patents, for which Magnavox was our primary licensee. Atari had several coin-op units at the show. One of these was “Touch-Me” and thereby hangs the present tale: "Touch-Me" was a in a waist-high cabinet with four large, dark “buttons" facing the player on its top, horizontal surface; during the game, the buttons lit up in random sequences and the machine issued truly aweful, raucous accompanying sounds. It was the player’s job to follow the light sequence of the buttons. Howard Morrison also saw “Touch Me” and played it. Now, Howard was one of the partners at Marvin Glass & Associates, the US’ premier toy & game design group in those years, whose outside electronics “capability” I had become at the time. That required me to spend a lot of time at their Chicago design offices working with them on new products when I wasn’t cranking out designs back home in my New Hampshire lab. Some time later, we discussed the game. We both came to the same conclusion: Nice game idea, terrible execution ... visually lousy, miserable sounds! It was then that we decided that doing a hand-held game using “Touch-Me’s” basic, generic game play of “Simon Says” was worth a shot. We outlined a brief spec for what we called our “Follow-Me” game. Back home to New Hampshire I coralled Lenny Cope, my young software guru and associate at Sanders. After hours and week-ends, he and I took a first look at the hardware and software requirements for “Follow-Me”. We decided to build the game around the Texas Instrument TMS-1000 micro-procesor chip, having had experience with it in prior jobs. These included a programmable record-changer and Coleco’s "Amazatron" game, both of which we did for Marvin Glass in ‘76. It was not until early in 1977 that we intensively got into the job of writing code for the game. In March of that year I had to have a back operation. I remember distinctly sitting in my dining room a couple of weeks later, still in my bathrobe and feeling less than great, surounded by the local T.I. rep, two T.I. tech reps from the regional office and Lenny, hacking away at the spec for the game. Writing programs for the TMS-1000 in those days was a real chore. We had a teletype terminal which Lenny used to communicate with a computer somewhere in Pennsylvania on which T.I.’s program for the device was resident. The monthly telephone bills that ensued looked like the national debt. And, of course, communicationg at a couple of hundred baud (bits) per second took forever. Nevertheless, Lenny “coped” with the situation and made gradual progress encoding the ever-growing list of changes Howard Morrison and I laid on him as we got into the rythm of the game play. I designed and built a physical unit containing
a version of the TMS-1000 using external Read-Only-Memory (ROM), a socket for the ROM, the
four light bulbs and the loudspeaker and their “drivers”, the four push-button
switches and several game-selector switches. Also, I took on the job of selecting the four
tones, which was a non-trivial mattter Pretty soon we were ready for a demo to potential clients: Milton Bradley being the first to see the current incarnation of “Follow Me” at the Marvin Glass studio in Chicago. As usual, it was Mel Taft who came from Bradley’s Massachusetts’ head-shed to view new product. What he saw at the time was a square unit, about 8x8 inches which played like gang-busters. The illustration in the SIMON patent still show that configuration. Milton-Bradley decided to “go” with the game shortly thereafter; later, they renamed the game “Simon” ... which made perfect sense. I’ll spare you a description of the assorted trials and tribulations we went through while finishing the development of SIMON to MB’s satisfaction. In those days, Ed Shea, Milton-Bradley’s president accompanied by Dorothy Wooster, his game-play psychology guru and sidekick, were the sole arbiters of what flew and what didn’t ... if they liked a game, it was a GO ... if not, the game was dead! Good old Dorothy Wooster kept upping the ante ... wanting more and more game features in SIMON ... so Lenny kept repacking the suitcase (so to speak) to squeeze additional code into the very limited memory of the TMS-1000. That he did a good job is testified to by the subsequent sales of many millions of SIMON games ... sales that are still going strong 20+ years after "Simon's" first introduction in 1979. Publicity for SIMON started with a midnight showing to the press at Club 57 downtown New York, temporarily interrupting the din of the D.J.’s dance music and halting the movement of the mostly zonked-out patrons on the the floor, while a 4-foot diameter SIMON floated through the air above. George Dittomassi, then a Bradley VP and later its president, was in charge of SIMON's introduction to an unsuspecting world; he held forth briefly on the game’s virtues. I don’t know who listened to him because it was about three o’clock in the morning by that time and those of us who weren’t dancing (or whatever you call that stuff they were doing on the floor) were trying hard to stay awake up in the balcony where it was pitch-dark but where the sound was a few hundred decibels lower. I was up there with several Glass of the Marvin-Glass partners, having been ferried to the Club by stretch-limo from the Waldorf Astoria hotel, courtesy of Milton-Bradley. One of the things that serendipitously helped SIMON sales during its first year was the appearance of the movie hit “Encounters of a Third Kind”. In that movie, a spaceship lands at a US military installation. The spaceship (a round saucer) looked for all the world like a SIMON, or vice versa; and it communicated by emitting sounds, a sequence of tones that also closely resembled SIMON’s ... talk about coincidents! We filed for a patent on SIMON in July of ‘77; it issued as US patent No. 4,207,087 in June of ‘80; cited under “Other Publications” in the references on the cover page is “Touch-Me - Operating and Maintainace Manual pp.1-8” ... and so, quite unintentionally, I managed to upstage Nolan just this once. ...and now you have it! Erstellt am 08.12.98. Zuletzt bearbeitet am 08.09.03. |
