All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (4 page)

The organizational skills Baer learned in the military would serve him well as he began work on his videogame machine. Too, his experiences in the army imbued him with a self-confidence and talent for communication that helped him open up to those above him in rank. He may have been a nerd who cared more about technology than girls, but he was a surprisingly charismatic nerd who didn’t hide away a good idea when he truly believed he had one; he had chutzpah.

His design skills improved as he worked on radio equipment in college in Chicago, and on radar equipment and amplifiers at Transitron, a small company in what is now New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. Soon, Baer was chief engineer and then vice president at Transitron; he moved up the ranks because he was able to get things done quickly and accurately. By the time Sanders Associates made him a chief engineer, he was more of a manager than an inventor. Yet he yearned to get his hands dirty.

The $2,500 Baer received from his boss for developing Let’s Play! may not seem like much now. But in 1966, the sum was enough to purchase a new car, was one third of the amount most Americans earned yearly, and was more than half the cost of the average home. Baer had two men assigned to the project to do the hourly work. Bill Harrison, a hip-looking, conscientious engineering associate, built the prototypes. Bill Rusch, a cranky, temperamental powerhouse who had studied at MIT, came up with the idea of a “machine-controlled ball that would interact with player-controlled ‘paddles.’ ” Both men were already on Sanders’s payroll.

The project was top secret and time-consuming, so much so that
Rusch brought a guitar to work so he could blow off steam—leading some curious wall-listeners in the company to believe that Baer was working on some sort of technologically advanced musical instrument, perhaps for the Beatles. But Baer’s boss, Herb Campman, didn’t care about rock ’n’ roll. He gave Baer the money for a sensible reason: He felt the company could eventually make games that would work well in training the military. He was not wrong.

Baer and his wife, Dena, would occasionally canoe in the Merrimack River and walk hand in hand through the Manchester, New Hampshire, snow as it fell. They loved the quaint town. But the weather could be as hostile as the tundra-like blizzards that fell in Capcom’s treacherous Lost Planet. The heavy snows just made Baer work harder. The game box became a consuming project that bordered on obsession. Inventors are like that: zealous to the exclusion of others. It was that way with surveyor George R. Carey, who had the idea for an early TV, the tectroscope, in 1877. It was that way, too, with the twenty-two inventors who tried to make a practical lightbulb after Humphry Davy created incandescent light in 1802, more than seventy-five years before the compulsive Thomas Edison and his team made a bulb that could last twelve hundred hours.

By the time Baer, Harrison, and Rusch were deep into it, the trio had tested many prototype machines, drably named TV Games #1 through #7. To the untrained eye, the inner workings seemed like a vision of chaos. The insides of even the later prototypes looked like a mass of angel hair pasta swirling in a pot of boiling hot water.

Yet the machine worked like magic. It hooked up to a TV’s antenna terminals and used the frequencies of channel 3 or channel 4. On the screen were what Baer called “spots,” little white squares that could be moved around smoothly like a puck on the ice. Attached were two metal boxes that had knobs for vertical and horizontal manipulation. TV Games #1 used four vacuum tubes. There were no circuitry chips; they were luxuries that were too expensive at the
time. And there were no transistors. Although Higinbotham used them in his tests, Baer didn’t yet trust transistor technology. But when the box was switched on and that spot moved on-screen for the first time, it was quite the eureka moment. Baer didn’t jump up and down or wave his fist in the air. But inside, he was thrilled and amazed.

What the primitive contraption would do was extraordinary. It would make the television an extension of you, the player. It would let you interact with a square on a black-and-white screen, and if you had even the lamest imagination, it made you believe you were volleying at tennis, aiming carefully as a brave marksman, even playing hero to the innocent as you saved lives.

While the design work proceeded apace, there were continual roadblocks. Worker bees would be called off the project, assigned to work on some secret, pressing defense initiative. At the same time, Sanders executives sometimes seemed aloof and uninterested. In addition, the machine itself became unwieldy. One of the early prototypes was completely impractical, with a chassis that was as large as a kitchen sink. It also looked like something out of high school shop class.

On June 14, 1967, Baer showed Herb Campman a shooting game with a toy gun rigged up with a light mechanism, which interacted with the TV screen. Campman and Sanders’s patent lawyer was impressed enough to call a meeting with the company president and the stodgy board of directors—the next day. Baer had seven games he wanted to show on a color TV set: chess, steeple chase, a fox-and-hounds game, target shooting, a color wheel game, a bucket-filling game, and that firefighter game in which you’d whale on a pump handle like you were trying to get water from a well. If you did it right, water would get to a window in a house. If you failed, the house would go up in flames. On the night before the demo, Baer frantically searched for a script explaining the seven games that he’d
recorded circus-barker-style on a sixty-minute Mercury cassette tape. Though he found the tape quickly, Baer was still apprehensive. He tossed and turned in his bed. But he was ready.

The big bosses filed into a dreary conference room on June 15. There was whispering and conferring and the raising of eyebrows during the demonstration. Bill Harrison noticed that Sanders himself was completely uninterested. He was gossiping about a competitor with another colleague. But, ultimately, the suits seemed impressed. Harold Pope, the affable company president who’d come up through the ranks as an engineer, didn’t quite know what to do with what he had seen. Pope’s command to Baer was “Build us something we can sell or license.”

“Build us something we can sell” was a grim declaration that would irk Baer during the next several years. Compared to figuring out how to sell it, getting the console to work properly was the least of his worries. Because gossip had begun among Sanders employees, Baer made sure the work in his ten-by-twenty-foot lab was treated as a top secret project. He told Harrison, “I don’t care if people in the company think we’re making some kind of guitar. I just want to get the job done without a lot of questions from people who aren’t involved.” It was like the first rule of Fight Club. Baer told his team in no uncertain terms, “You don’t talk about TV Games.”

In February 1967, the three created the Quiz Light Pen, which, when attached to TV Games, could be used for an educational instruction and game show–like experience. “Just point it at the screen and click a button to make it work,” announced Baer in impresario mode as he spoke to the camera in a primitive half-hour black-and-white instructional video, which showed how aiming the pen at small boxes on the screen could be used to answer multiple choice questions. Maybe it could even be used for a game show, thought Baer, like
Jeopardy!

The inventiveness didn’t stop there. In a memo stamped
“Company Private,” Baer also made plans for a steering wheel for racing games and a device that would let you make artistic drawings on the TV screen. There was a baseball game and a strange ESP-like number guessing game. There would be a peripheral for a golf game that included a putter. There was skeet shooting, soccer, and horse racing, too. And there was a cool, addictive version of a Ping-Pong game, the game that people would play the most. (It was also a game that would soon be ripped off, become more popular than Baer ever imagined, and herald a very nasty lawsuit.)

Admittedly, these games were all done with “spots,” not high-quality artwork. To make the games feel more real, the team designed plastic overlays that, through static electricity, stuck to the TV screen. They looked like Howard Johnson restaurant place mats but were somewhat transparent. There was no masterful artwork to the overlays, but the best of them resembled the most dramatic back glass art on pinball games of the day. The first joysticks included were two controllers that had horizontal and vertical abilities and knobs to add English to the ball, somewhat like Tennis for Two (which Baer said he never saw at the Brookhaven National Laboratory).

More ideas for technology and games spewed forth, and so did some manna from heaven: $8,000 more from Sanders’s Campman. The goal in early 1968 was to beef up the console’s circuitry to make it a leaner, meaner machine. Rusch was also able to make those all-important square spots circular, even star-shaped. Initially, Rusch preened, thinking he had done something as historic as translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. Baer was totally enthused, too, until they found a problem with the spots. They moved randomly when they weren’t supposed to. They ran up or down or to the side like feral animals. Sometimes, they’d even change their shapes. Baer decided to stick with the square spots, even though Rusch put up a fuss. This was a constant cycle between the two. Baer would try to mend fences with
Rusch. He’d seem OK for a while. Then he’d go off the rails and get angry again.

Inventing was natural to Baer, Harrison, and Rusch; as engineers, they got it. But Baer lay awake at night thinking about the company president’s dictum. Over and over, he asked himself, “How do we sell this? We’re a defense contractor. We can’t manufacture this. We don’t have the infrastructure. Do we license it to someone? How do we do that?” To complicate matters, he still had no business plan whatsoever. By mid-June, management was unyielding; they demanded precise details. The business plan questions kept coming with far more frequency.

Baer racked his brain. His first plan was to involve the nascent cable TV industry. Cable TV, available in the United States since the late 1940s, was in the doldrums. Americans didn’t want to pay for television programming unless mountains interfered with their over-air signals. In the late sixties, people were more than content with innovations in network television—like the first Super Bowl, Gene Roddenberry’s
Star Trek
(which dealt with societal issues in a science fiction way), and the ever naughty
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
(on which British mod-rockers the Who went wild and maniacally destroyed their instruments).

Baer believed his TV Games idea could give the cable industry a “shot in the arm.” To Campman, Baer suggested, “We could create the action, and the cable company would provide colorful backgrounds for our games” from their studios. Especially since the plastic layovers Baer and his team had been able to create were graphically unimpressive, the plan had merit. Cable companies could provide an almost photographic level of detail for backgrounds.

The TelePrompter Corporation, the people who now make the machines from which newscasters and others on TV read, also outfitted sixty thousand families with cable TV. They were the country’s
biggest cable provider at the time. After some prodding, one of the founders, Hubert “Hub” Schlafly, agreed to meet with Baer in New Hampshire. Schlafly so thoroughly enjoyed the games experience that he suggested to Irving Berlin Kahn, the company’s president, that he better get up to Nashua because something important was happening there. A week later, an impeccably dressed Kahn arrived from New York in a stretch limo. After that, there was a series of excited, hopeful meetings with TelePrompter executives in New York City. But a recession had hit the nation, and TelePrompter wimped out: They claimed to be out of money when it came to new projects. The same sour outcome occurred after initially optimistic meetings with Manhattan Cable and Warner Cable. Who knows how much more quickly today’s downloadable games would have become popular had Baer’s cable deal been given the green light back in the early 1970s. Conceivably, a company like TelePrompter might now be as vital as Sony or even Nintendo in the videogame industry.

If Baer’s dealings with the cable companies were disappointing, he hadn’t endured anything yet. When the TelePrompter deal fell through, Campman unceremoniously ordered an end to the flow of money for the game console. Other projects needed work, and Baer hadn’t proven the viability of TV Games as a business. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that Baer was able to convince Campman to add some more research and development money and reassign engineer Bill Harrison to the project. Harrison’s first order of business was to go shopping at Sears to purchase a plastic toy gun. But he wasn’t going to play cops and robbers. With a mini-flashlight-sized lightbulb and a transistor amplifier, Harrison refashioned the toy into a weapon that worked when aimed at an object on the TV. Even more valuable was Harrison’s savvy when it came to circuitry, which allowed him to reduce the number of parts in the latest prototype by about 50 percent. But the box looked somehow unadorned. Baer asked Harrison to go out to the store to get some self-adhesive kitchen cabinet liner
that made the box look a little better. While the liner had a cheesy, basement rec room look, it inspired a generally catchy name, the Brown Box. Like the adhesive, it stuck.

In 1968, there were more than one hundred TV makers in the United States alone. Baer got the idea to phone each of them to see if one would consider manufacturing TV Games. He had some help: Sanders’s director of patents, Louis Etlinger, was a smart New York lawyer with a folksy demeanor that made people believe he was from the sticks. Etlinger made the cold calls and charmed his way into setting up appointment after appointment with major corporations. But it was Baer who had to sell the idea, based on his demonstrations with Harrison. While Baer was an erudite speaker, he didn’t have a salesman’s swagger. In one early meeting, a buyer from Sears felt their numerous retail stores would be mobbed by kids who wanted to play the system in the store, but wouldn’t buy it. The Sears buyer felt that the stores would be forced into the role of babysitter for hordes of screaming brats. Baer sorely needed a Madison Avenue marketer to help him from that point on. But there was no budget for a showperson who would come to meetings armed with talking points and glittering generalities.