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AbleGamers Speaks to Ralph Baer: The Father of Video Games
So you may be asking yourself, who is Ralph Baer, and why are you telling me about him? May answer is simple; he is the father of Video games. If you have ever played a video game, if you have looked at one, if you thought about one, you have Mr. Ralph Baer to thank. Here is the short version, for the whole story, click here.
In 1966, Ralph noticed that 40 million TV sets were in American homes. He says, "They were literally begging to be used for something other than watching commercial television broadcasts!"
Therefore, he started thinking about what else they could be doing. "When I designed and built a TV set at Loral in 1955, I had proposed doing just that: Build in a game to differentiate our TV set from the competition. Management said No and that was that."
So it started as an idea of built-in games, in August of 1966 it hit him, a "game box", forget built-in. So, right there the birth of the Video game revolution. In Mr. Baer's office in New Hampshire, September 1, 1966.
In 1968, the prototype "Brown Box" was created, and on it you could play Ping-pong, Handball, and even a shooting game (think duck hunt). Using the brown box as a demo unit, they convinced Magnavox in 1971 to buy into the technology.
In 1972 Odyssey Home Video Game System, a production version of the Brown Box hit the streets, and well over 130,000 were sold.
From there you have PONG (Atari's Nolan Bushnell lost a court battle to Magnavox and Mr. Baer for stealing the idea of PONG) and from PONG you can go all the way to Halo 3.
(For those older members (35+) and if you ever opened a gift from Santa to fine a SIMON in it, you h
ave Mr. Baer to thank.)
AbleGamers' Mark Barlet: You are the "father of video gaming." Everything that I have looked at and read about all comes back to the work you were doing in 1966. This year they estimate that the video game market is going to be a 56-billion dollar industry in the U.S. alone. Did you have any idea, when you were doing that work in 1966, that you were created something so big?
Mr. Baer: I think you know the answer to that question. Of course not! I mean, can we look into a 'crystal ball'? Yeah, we can look into it, but it doesn't give us any answers. I'm working on a game that might look like a crystal ball but is basically a Theremin. Do you remember what a Theremin is?
AbleGamers: Yes.
Mr. Baer: You wave your hands over a bar and change the pitch (of the sound that) comes out. You know, you wave your hands over the 'crystal ball' and it comes back with ethereal noises and it reads your future. And of course, the future it reads is about as close to what's going to happen as was our ability to look into the future in 1966 and see what's coming.
What people don't realize is that what's happened is a large function of - or the result of - what happened in the electronics industry in general. Tremendous developments and advances in semiconductor technology that eventually gave us the microprocessor, eventually developed the Personal Computers that made computing possible.
People have no idea how different the world is today than it was forty-years ago, and of course if that hadn't happened we'd probably still be playing Ping-Pong games on the screen.
AbleGamers: Right. I actually had a TV that had the Ping-Pong Game built into it and I thought it was the greatest thing in the world.
Mr. Baer: Do you remember the make?
AbleGamers: I believe it was a Magnavox?
Mr. Baer: It had to be, because Magnavox produced such a TV set. I never saw one of these machines. I'd love to see one.
AbleGamers: Yeah . . . it was a TV and my mom got it at a garage sale and you plugged the little controllers into the back of the television . . . And, it had a regular TV in it. I could tune to the different channels and everything like that. But, if I flipped the switch on the front it was a tennis game.
Mr. Baer: Do you have the slightest idea what happened to that? You know, this is a museum piece.
AbleGamers: I do not doubt it. It was 1984 when I had it and it was in the town of Carl's Corner, Texas. I can still see that thing in my room.
Mr. Baer: I've never come across it. All my original 1966, 1967, 1968 videogame hardware, which we built at Sanders is still around and it's all at the Smithsonian. I've been replicating some of it and they're all over the museums in this country and in Germany and Japan and other places. But that TV set would be worth quite a few bucks. Do you realize that?
AbleGamers: I think my mom actually bought it for $2.00.
Mr. Baer: And it worked!
AbleGamers: It worked beautifully and it had both controllers and both controllers worked.
Mr. Baer: Well, go on with your questions. You'll find out one thing. I'm 87 and normally engineers aren't very talkative, but the garrulousness comes with the age. If you don't shut me up I'll go on.
AbleGamers: Well you're welcome to, sir. So, do you play video games today?
Mr. Baer: Only when my grandkids come by and bring their Wii or something else. Of course, I play replicas of the Brown Box very often. In fact, I just corresponded with a gal in Germany who is making arrangements for a trip there. I'm invited to speak at a conference there towards the end of June and to hand an award to the guy who invested Tetris at that conference - Alexey Pajitnov. I've been at a previous session, the (German Game Developers Association in Germany), where they handed me an award.
You know when I go there I take along with me, replicas of the Brown Box and we usually set it up somewhere and play. The audience really goes for that. Last year I played the Mayor of Utrecht in Holland during a game development conference. From there I went to Paris where I played nobody in particular. From there to Germany and the town I was born in and I played the mayor there. I whipped both of them. Of course! So I do play my old machine, quite often but you can't compare that to playing a modern videogame.
I played one the other night. I was invited, at MIT, to give a talk so I had the floor for about two hours. Before I went there I stopped by a friend of mine who runs a small game company, and they're working on a game that's basically a Pong game, where the balls go back-and-forth and left-to-right and paddles are on each side . . . although the game is totally different from the original Pong. But, it was easy for me to manipulate it and they actually took some pictures of me sitting there and the developer made a blog out of it instantly.
So I play but I'll tell you, my reaction time isn't what it used to be . . . I just can't play those damn games. I tried one of the race games with one of my grandkids recently and I was always banging the cars into the side of the street or the wall.
AbleGamers: Were you playing Mario Kart?
Mr. Baer: I forgot what it was, but I gave up after about ten-minutes.
AbleGamers: What is your take on some of the new "control schemes", like the Wii and even some of the more modern X-Boxes and stuff like that, compared to some of the controllers that you had when you first put out the Brown Box and then later the Odyssey system? What are your thoughts on the "control schemes" of these types of consoles now?
Mr. Baer: Well, in 1989-1990, I demonstrated similar control to Emil Heidkamp still a VP at Konami, today. He was downstairs in my lab with three Chinese manufacturing types who ran around taking pictures or making 'mental notes' of what they saw. They probably 'ripped me off' on a whole bunch of things, which is pretty much what the Wii is doing right now, because even back then I was championing the idea of getting kids off their ‘back sides', to put it bluntly. Move around, get them into the game. They ripped me off with on a helmet. It had a gun sight in it and a little mic so you could yell "fire", put the crosshairs on a target, airplanes flying by and yell whatever you wanted to yet . . . Fire! It doesn't matter . . . to take off and hit the target. That, they ripped me off on. What was I going to do? Sue them? You can't sue Konami unless you have all the money in the world.
AbleGamers: I wouldn't try.
Mr. Baer: But the answer to your question is . . . I am completely and totally in favor of everything they're doing. It's about time.
AbleGamers: You know, that said, some of these controllers are not very friendly to people with disabilities. Have you given any thought, over the years, about how people with disabilities would play video games?
Mr. Baer: Yes. Among other things, I have a friend who never seems to be able to make any money. He's just too kind. I think he is. He's working with wheelchair-bound people for many years now, to help them in one way or another to get them into a computer, to get them to interact with hardware. I also know that very early on with the original Odyssey in 1972-1973 there were people who used the machines to work with dyslexic people, to work with people with mental handicaps.
AbleGamers: So people were developing custom type of programs and using the hardware for, what is now know as, "serious gaming"?
Mr. Baer: Yeah, well I'm sure that goes on. I only have 24-hours a day and I make use of less and less of it because one thing you'll find when you get old enough is that you get tired .....and I sleep-away half my life now. I used to be able to get by on five or six hours. Now I need eight and I need an hour nap during the day. So my ability to do 10,000 things at once no longer exists.
AbleGamers: What do you think the Internet has done to gaming? I know that there was an archaic version of the Internet. In fact, I still believe that the underbelly of the Internet is still archaic, but you know, some of the revolution that has come in the last ten years to gaming has been around the online interaction. What are your thoughts around that? Specifically, the reason why I ask that question is because for a lot of people who are severely disabled, the online interactions that games bring are really kind of their "window to the world".
Mr. Baer: I understand that exactly. Here again, I'm with you. I thought about it often and right now in fact I'm thinking about the lack of what I call really useful "geriatric electronics". Think about me. I maybe geriatric, but I'm not isolated, and one of the reasons is that I use Skype regularly, with my kids and my grandkids, all of whom live out West. They're in Salt Lake City. They're in Boulder, Colorado and in Seattle, and nowhere near New Hampshire. I'm alone. I'm rattling around alone in this house. So how do I stay in touch? It's obvious: Through Video-conferencing....and it's free. It's called Skype. Right? And as far as I'm concerned the most important thing you could do for the handicapped community is to somehow make it physically possible for them to communicate with others, to look at and talk and to see them in their environment.
AbleGamers: That's something that's important to us. It's interesting that when you look at games, such as World of Warcraft and things like that, they allow a person with a handicap to also do something that you might not have thought about, and that is hide from their handicap. You know, the anonymity of the Internet allows you, me or anyone to be whomever we want when we're in one of these gaming settings. So many people with disabilities, who at times in their lives have had people not treat them as equals, can use these gaming technologies and basically just be "one of the guys", so to speak.
Mr. Baer: I understand that and I appreciate it. The problem there is, and I don't have to tell you, that depending upon your disability, you can't use existing controllers or you can't use a keyboard if you're sitting in front of the computer, and the question is . . . How do you overcome that? What you need, obviously, is somebody like the Gates Foundation putting together a small panel that takes that subject seriously and creates a workshop where a handicapped individual can apply, explain his handicaps and get a custom piece of interface hardware at no cost.
AbleGamers: you said something about "controller" . . . one of the things I think that the disabled community is having a hard time with is that the SDK that Microsoft has, to develop an X-Box controller or that Sony has to develop a Playstation controller, is in the neighborhood of anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 for the license to build these things. That causes, unfortunately, people who are going to make very niche controllers for a very small subset of a disabled community, basically not able to do it because in order to even pay for the licensing fee they have to charge $20,000 a controller.
Mr. Baer: That really "stinks on ice", doesn't it?
AbleGamers: We think it "stinks on ice" and we know that there are a lot of controllers out there that are being made by basically hacking existing off-the-shelf controllers. You do not know how many controllers I've seen that look like a Frankenstein because of the "licensing" of the . . .
Mr. Baer: Well, I can understand that. That's what I would do. If I were disabled I'd either work on it if I were able to, or work with somebody who has the ability to do it. Take an existing controller and extend some buttons so I could hit them with my chin or whatever I need to do. Right? It's obvious! It's really a "down low" situation for companies like Nintendo and others, especially Microsoft, whom I don't have any real love for to begin with, to charge licensing fees for people who make these keyboards and who probably don't make a hell of a lot of money on them anyhow.
AbleGamers: That's true. I think that a couple of people that I know that have hacked have been able to kind of get around the licensing fee by not actually breaking the controller boards apart, but just soldering to the points and leaving the controller, for the most part, intact. I believe it's kind of like a little bit of a "work around" so you're not technically breaking the law.
Mr. Baer: Yeah, the obvious solution is to clip something onto an existing hand controller and so that it just attaches. It doesn't even electrically have to connect. You just clip something on that mechanically or through a solenoid, reaches down to the buttons and activates them with extended levers or whatever is required to provide the proper interface, to which nobody can object, and which doesn't constitute any infringement.
AbleGamers: The controllers are only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the software, the games themselves. Do you think that developers of AAA Titles have an obligation to at least consider the disabled community as they develop these games? Because let's face it. I can find you all the controllers in the world that can go all sorts of things, especially on the PC, but if the game doesn't have the flexibility, with its programming, to re-map the keys or to change key combinations to better suit what I can control, then there's no controller in the world that's going to make a game accessible. So back to my question. Do you believe that there should be an obligation by developers to at least acknowledge the fact that accessibility is an issue and try to do their best to address it as best they can without necessarily destroying whatever vision they have in the game?
Mr. Baer: Well, I think there's a two-part answer to that. In the first place, you're working on a shoestring budget . . . but if I were you and could find the money, I'd be at a game developers' conference where there are 15,000 people, in San Francisco.
AbleGamers: We were there this year and last year.
Mr. Baer: Oh, you were there last year! What did you do? Did you attract any attention? Did anybody pay attention beyond "lip service"? Did you get anybody to do anything really useful?
AbleGamers: In fact, sir, I can say we have and this year especially. Last year was kind of a "learning experience" for us because it was the first time we had been able to go to one of these events. This year we had actually done some, what MSNBC called "ambush interviews", where we actually asked developers . . . we asked eighty-one developers, as a matter of fact, had they ever thought of this subject, and we got some very interesting responses of people who were like . . . Yes! I've thought about this. I have a friend who has this or this disability. Then, we've gotten the same responses of . . . Wow! No, I've never thought of that before! So I think we are making headway.
Fortunately for us, we do have a couple of people through the International Gaming Development Association who have given us tickets to the GDC in the past. In fact, we were speakers both last year and this year. So being qualified as speakers gives us free passes to get in.
Mr. Baer: I think the other half of that equation is . . . Do you have any concrete ideas that you can throw out so that maybe somebody will actually latch onto it and do something about it?
AbleGamers: Yes, we do have a "top ten list". The Vice President of the Ablergamers Foundation was a professor game development and stuff like that, so we have developed kind of a "white paper" on how to make games more accessible.
Given . . . I don't think there's any pretense on our part that a game is going to be playable by every single person out there, but we do try to strive to get as many people into the game as possible.
Mr. Baer: Well you're doing all the right things. The question is "Will you get more money and more oomph!
AbleGamers: A question is . . . I wanted to ask someone who has such a vision . . . What do you think the next fifty years is going to look like in gaming? Let's fast-forward fifty years and look into your 'crystal ball' and tell me what I'm going to see.
Mr. Baer: I alluded to it before, we're on this curve, this technology curve that's practically a straight line to heaven. It took 50,000 year to get to the first wheel and another 50,000 years to get to where we were actually riding around in a powered vehicle. What's happened in the last five hundred years is we've rounded the curve (a process that) started to accelerate with the Industrial Revolution, maybe the 1850's, 1860's, 1870's. Now progress is so steep and things happen so fast, new products come out so rapidly and people are so used to it they don't even think about the fact that this is a totally different world from the one that I grew up in. So, when it comes to making predictions about the future . . . that's like talking about going to Mars. What's next? Right? Let's talk about the next ten years.
AbleGamers: Okay. Then what do the next ten years look like?
Mr. Baer: Well for one thing, obviously there will be a heck of a lot more 3-D stereo capabilities everywhere . . . they're beginning to show up in the theatres. There are a number of movies that are 3-D compatible, but the movie industry is still undecided as to which system . . . it's like Betamax versus the VHS, that's the situation right now. That'll get straightened out over the next two or three years.
Then all large-screen TV sets will have 3-D stereo capability. How that'll get into the games? Of course it already has started. There are games out there that are playing in 3-D, mostly I think anaglyphic 3-D. However, that business of wearing a red and a bluish lens and having images tinted, is a pretty poor excuse for doing 3-D.. So 3-D is going to make a big impact.
There will be new genres of games. Somebody will come out with something new. If you think about all the different variations of games that are out there now. It's not all 'blood and guts'. It's not all auto racing. It's not all one-on-one shooting. It's SIMS. It's history. It's all of that. There'll be more of that.
And in terms of the graphics, they're already within one generation of being so close to being totally realistic you won't be able to tell the difference between a movie and a game.
But the question is a little bit like asking me . . . What do you expect to see in literature in the next ten years? Books. Right? How the hell do I know? You know, People have been writing books for 500-years . . . well actually 5,000-years. Right? But as a practical matter for at least 500-years and they always find something new to write about. Right? Or, something old to write about differently. Games are the same thing.
AbleGamers: It's interesting . . . I wanted to ask you just a quick follow-up. Do you think that at some point in the near future, will "story-line" and "game depth" make a comeback versus graphics, graphics, graphics?
Mr. Baer: Oh, yeah! I think it's already happening. That's what I was alluding to. Basically, people watch TV because they like story-lines. Right? They watch movies because they like story-lines. They're missing in a lot of the games. But what do I know? I don't play these God-damn games (laughter).
AbleGamers: No, but you invented most of them.
Mr. Baer: Well, I started out . . . think about it. In 1967 we started in a lab. We only had about two or three weeks and the technician had to go off and do something else. We came up with the notion of a light gun. We had joysticks. Video overlays, because we couldn't do colorful backgrounds any other way. We had remotely-located hand-controllers that were tethered to the machine by cable. We started right out with all this good stuff.
AbleGamers: My last question for you, good sir, is . . . . . I believe you're also the inventor of the game Simon.
I just wanted to say that I actually remember getting my first Simon and I had a lot of fun with that and I think that it was one of the things that actually was a real bonding experience between my mother and I. I did not have the greatest of childhood and my mother had come and gone in my life, and I remember some of my fondest memories as sitting in her lap and her and I playing Simon together . . . the "te doot" and I would take one color and she would take the other color and we were responsible for our side of the board. It was a moment in my life that I can still remember to this day and I'm now 35-years old, but I can remember sitting on my mom's lap and playing that game with my mom.
Mr. Baer: That's a great recollection. You know what was unique in the early Simon that was really popular? It was the four tones I picked. How would you pick four tones for a game?
AbleGamers: Well, if I remember correctly I think they're a chord, but I don't remember which chord they are.
Mr. Baer: "Close, but no cigar." They have to sound good in any sequence, right? Well, one instrument plays this entire repertoire using four notes.
AbleGamers: Bells
Mr. Baer: Yeah, but I'm talking about four discrete notes. That's all there is, four notes. It turns out to be the bugle.
AbleGamers: Oh, that's true!
Mr. Baer: That's in the original Simon, as close as we could come with the limited software capability. It had just a four-bit processor in it with one K (of memory) . . . that's all that was in there. It made all the difference. Also the reason why the machine got really popular early-on is because you'll remember the movie Close Encounters of a Third Kind, I think it was called (was showing then).
AbleGamers: Right.
Mr. Baer: That came out and it showed the spaceship coming in . . .
AbleGamers: Be-bo-be-bo-bo.
Mr. Baer: It looked like a Simon that made similar noises . . .
AbleGamers: Yes! How many units of Simon did they sell? Have you ever had those figures?
Mr. Baer: No, but it's tens of millions. I mean, they're still around in different forms. I bought one just recently. It's really nice. It speaks, of course. Every toy speaks now. It speaks and invites you to play one of several games and it's very pretty looking and it has extremely bright LED's, colored LED's . . . red, green, blue and a white LED, I think it is, instead of the incandescent bulb in the original Simon.
AbleGamers: Yeah, I actually remember one of the bulbs on my Simon burned out.
Mr. Baer: Yeah, well it's easy enough to replace.
AbleGamers: I was too young to care. I think that's pretty much the end of the questions I have.
And so ended the chat that AbleGamers had with the person that started it all. Please leave comments below, we would love to know what you think.
{gallery}baer{/gallery}
That's a really good interview. Ralph Baer comes across as a fascinating fervent nice bloke. Re. Nolan Bushnell ripping him off with Pong, I am under the impression that Ralph got his own back by taking off Atari's arcade "Touch Me" with Simon. What goes around and all that.
This is awesome! 
Congratulations for having this really deep and meaningful interview with the father of video games.
I really enjoyed reading this small talk between you guys.
Actually, I'm a gamer and I almost appreciate all. Infact, I love playing video games as much as I love online games now.
But this is annoying....
Nolan Bushnell, founder of the Atari computer company and creator of Pong, the iconic tennis video game, will receive a Fellowship from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the video games industry.
Didnt he steal the Pong idea from Ralph Baer? We heard a keynote speech from Mr. Bushnell in London last year...and were suitably unimpressed to say the least!
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