They Create Worlds

On August 31, 1966, an electrical engineer serving as a division head for a large New Hampshire defense contractor called Sanders Associates sat on a cement step outside a New York City bus terminal waiting for a colleague to arrive so they could meet a client together. A television engineer in earlier days, he considered this appliance – now present in over 90% of American homes – almost completely useless. Sure, the typical family loved its TV set, gathering around it in the evening to watch Walter Cronkite deliver the news or catch the latest happenings in Mayberry on the Andy Griffith Show, but with only three networks on the air, programming lacked variety, and the engineer considered these meager offerings to be a passive and dull form of entertainment. His own television sat unused in his living room much of the time, and he figured he was not alone. Certainly, he thought, the television must be able to offer something more.

In 1951, the engineer had almost done something about it. Tasked with building the "best television set ever" by his employer, the Loral Corporation, the engineer would sometimes fool around with test equipment that placed lines and color bars on the screen and allowed the user to move them around to adjust the set. Before long, he came to believe that moving objects around on a television might just be a fun way for a person to pass a few spare moments. Inspired, the engineer suggested incorporating some type of game into his new ultimate television, but the project was already behind schedule, and his boss would not hear of it.

Now, on this warm summer’s day in 1966 the concept came to the engineer again, rising unbidden out of his subconscious mind as he idly watched traffic passing by. Pulling out his notebook, he began scribbling furiously. Upon returning to his office the next day, the engineer turned this disorganized jumble into a four-page disclosure document for a "TV Gaming Display" in which a "low cost data entry device" could generate a video signal conveyed directly to the television through its antenna terminals. Conflicted at proposing such a frivolous project to a defense contractor, the engineer couched the opening sentences of his document in generic technical language before finally gaining confidence and christening the channel on which the device would broadcast "Channel LP," which stood for "Let’s Play."

The engineer in our story was not the first person to dream of controlling an object rendered on a screen in order to play a game. Indeed, college students across the United States had already been hunting each other in the cold vacuum of computer-generated space for nearly half a decade when Ralph Henry Baer signed his name at the top of each page of his proposal on that fateful Thursday in September, while an eminent physicist with the Dickensian name Willy Higinbotham had wowed visitors to the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York with a primitive tennis game displayed on an oscilloscope even earlier than that. But Baer was the first person to suggest creating an interactive entertainment experience by conveying game data to a display through the use of a video signal, so even though he never used the term in any of his subsequent documentation or patents, he is nevertheless the progenitor of what we now call the video game.