LEVEL ONE
ON JULY 17,1969, German-born Ralph Baer found himself standing beside a 19-inch TV at the front of the Magnavox corporate boardroom in Fort Wayne holding a putter, a plastic rifle, and a mysterious box wrapped in brown wood-grain vinyl tape. Baer was an engineer from New Hampshire, and he had just finished a demonstration of his latest invention, a presentation that had previously been rejected by several companies, including Magnavox. Still, Baer persisted in his belief that his machine would change the way people thought about their televisions. To his mind, it was all on the screen next to him: one white vertical line bisecting the black field and three white dots. Two dots, one on either side of the line, represented pingpong paddles zipping up and down to “hit” the third dot (the ball) back and forth. It was essentially the world’s first video game. But once again, Baer’s audience seemed underwhelmed.
As Baer looked out at the firing squad of suited Magnavox executives seated around the long, dark conference table, all he saw were glum faces.
Except for one.
That lone enthusiastic smile belonged to Gerry Martin, whose opinion was the only one that mattered. The vice president and general manager for console products, Martin had the conviction of a businessman who saw dollar signs: “We’re going with this.”
Baer’s so-called “Brown Box” was an early prototype of what would come to be known as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first-ever commercial home videogame console. Those four simple words not only instantly lifted the gloom in the room, not to mention eventually fulfilled Baer’s dream of transforming the TV industry—but Martin’s decision in that Indiana boardroom would go on to fundamentally alter everyday life for generations to come.
Over the ensuing months, Baer and technician Bill Harrison would make frequent trips to Fort Wayne to help develop the Odyssey, a machine that, upon its release in mid-September 1972, would enable kids and adults alike to play computerized simulations of volleyball, hockey, target shooting (hence the rifle), golf (the real putter), and, most famously, pingpong in their own living rooms, basements, and bedrooms. More than inventing the idea of a modern video game, Baer was about to introduce the world to the concept of interactivity, years before the buzzword was coined. “When this thing was being pitched, there were only three broadcast networks,” says Alexander Smith, videogame historian and author of 2019’s . “All you could do is sit back and watch the nightly news or Andy Griffith or whatever these networks deemed worthy of
