![]() ![]() Baer at Sanders Associates, while Magnavox completed development and released it in the United States in September 1972 and overseas the following year. The hardware was designed by a small team led by Ralph H. The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. ![]() In fact, Pong's success was actually visited back onto the Odyssey, which had its biggest sales in 1974-after Pong had become a huge arcade success, but a year before Atari could launch its first Home Pong product.US$99.95 (equivalent to about $699 in 2022) Odyssey wasn't a flop, but it didn't become the instant hit Pong did. So what's the problem in copying something you're never going to sell?" The whole outcome of this thing in retrospect was kind of like the movie The Producers: This was never supposed to be a successful game. ![]() "It was, this is the simplest game he could think of. "But it wasn't inspired because, 'Wow, we're going to make a fortune, we're going to piggyback on that great success,'" he says. ![]() "To put the Magnavox Odyssey in perspective, indeed, Nolan saw it and that inspired ," Alcorn says. He felt Magnavox had gone overboard adding bells and whistles. This was a sticking point for Baer, who'd engineered the machine to be a lean, mean $19.95 product. Odyssey cost $100 in 1972, the equivalent of $560 today. "Certainly, they took the idea," says Mark Baer, "and ran with it." Pong, besides being a more polished, refined, and fun version of Odyssey's tennis game, had one big advantage: Since Atari released it not as a home machine but as a coin-operated game, the cost of entry was 25 cents. He was already way over budget on this machine, and Nolan wanted realistic, synthesized sounds? "So I went off and, in half a day, poked around and found tones that were already in the circuit that I could pull out with less than one additional chip." That became the iconic, instantly recognizable, computer-age bouncing-ball sound the game is famous for. And I said, 'Oh my God, you never said that, Nolan!' And he says, 'Yeah, I want the roar of a crowd applauding.'"Īlcorn thought Bushnell was nuts. "At the end, Nolan says, it's got to have sound. "So the little things like the ball reflecting off of the paddle at different angles, I tweaked that up to try to make it as fun to play as I could."Īs Alcorn came close to completing the project to Bushnell's specifications, Atari's founder threw him for one last loop. "I was motivated to make it playable," he says. But since he had visions of this appearing under kids' Christmas trees with a General Electric logo on it, Alcorn iterated and iterated. Had Alcorn known that this tennis game was just a throwaway project meant to get him banging on something, perhaps he wouldn't have put so much care into the design of Pong. And I'm just pushing ahead, and Nolan would say, 'That's fine, you're doing great.'" But also, what wasn't surprising to me but should have been is that nobody from General Electric ever came by, or wrote us a letter or anything. Alcorn was having trouble meeting the cost requirements, but this wasn't as big an issue as he'd feared: "Nolan didn't seem too concerned, which was surprising to me. You could place an acetate overlay, included with the console, over your TV screen to add a green field and white lines if you wanted an extra layer of "realism." But the gameplay was so gripping that the dots were more than enough. The practice of bouncing a ball back and forth across the screen might have caught on more with Odyssey players because the primitive hardware couldn't render much beyond squares that flitted across the screen. "That was the big one, right from the get-go," says Mark Baer. But one of them was clearly the most fun, by a mile: ping pong. Baer and his team were creating entire genres of videogame out of whole cloth, one after the other. Target shooting, with a life-size rifle controller. "I'm certain of it."īeyond the idea of playing games on a television, Baer also created a wide variety of games to play: Skiing. "I would like to believe that I was the first one to win a videogame, because I kicked my brother's butt," he says. "Playing that alone, and with my brother." playing some manifestation of early videogames," said Baer, who will accept the Pioneer Award next month on his father's behalf. "I can recall sitting in bedroom, when he had an old black and white TV with the little pull-starter. ![]()
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