[Music]
and here we have a little bear who's uh
if he works is going to be part of a
game I won't describe but uh he he's
really nasty today
yeah hello Richard you don't mind if I
call you Richard I hope that's not
exactly novel there there are other
talking Bears out there and they have
synchronized lip motion which is a real
cute part you know they'll have the
mouth moving realistic with what you do
with it is another story what game or
you make of it that's the hard part so
that's what I'm working
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on well well I'm uh I'm Ralph Bayer
that's b a r although a lots of people
spell it b a r which I object to and no
relationship to Bears I live in
Manchester New Hampshire for the last uh
53 years before that New York before
that in the armi before that New York
before that in Europe born in Germany
left uh Germany 1938 two months ahead of
the Nazis got real lucky yeah taught
myself Electronics through
correspondence courses I've been
cranking out uh toys and games
electronic toys and games after a
30-year career on Military electronics
and here's one of the talking books we
talked about earlier recordable talking
book uh record a word to describe about
something rotten
looks stinky oh
forget stinky I don't know what it works
well soon
see
didn't record the second button
batteries are low but that was a general
idea you major claim to fame obviously
is having come up with a concept of
video games the concept was to have uh
ordinary people in their homes uh uh
interact with a television set and think
about it a television set for the
technology of the day was a pretty
complex device but it was cheap why
because it's mass produced so I thought
that if I can attach something to a TV
said anything you know I would have a
real business you that was a
motivation and what I want to show you
here is a uh a series of replicas of
ancient games this was the second game
we built number two the game that we
used to demonstrate to the board of
directors and president of
Sanders uh we built our own joysticks
or uh own handgun
and a pump handle for playing games what
I got it up there at the moment is game
number in the second game let's have a
steeple chase one player is the hunter
the other is the red fox the hunter
chases the fox to wipe him out like so I
just wiped out the fox uh when when we
first started out before I had Bill
Harrison who came on in May of
67 in this little room of ours before I
had him build video game had him go out
and buy a plastic gun for the uh not for
for a video game but for a quiz game we
had a way of putting up up spots on the
screen that were different from each
other so you could recognize which spot
represented the proper answer you know
but then pretty soon I yeah I looked at
that gun I said hey we we can use this
gun to shoot at the screen a like on
game of course you yeah they put a
single spot on the screen and and go uh
point at the at the spot and if you
lined up properly spot disappears
Meanwhile your partner can be moving the
spot around for for a moving Target we
never built one player games because we
thought games as family
entertainment a few months later when B
Rush joined us and we noodled ideas
almost daily I came up with a business
of an in a machine control spot and ball
games started popping up that we really
had something the ball voling back and
forth one free ball plus one at Courtesy
of the local catv station here's my
partner bill a one a two a three and
down I go and up I go and down I go and
watch me fake him out I didn't do
it ah I did it this time okay once we
had ping pong we knew were in and then
stupid like Engineers are uh oh and
another couple of transitions here we
can do this and something more here we
can do this and we stretch the project
out for another year off and on when we
should have stopped after we had
pingpong because that's all people
wanted to have once we show the brown
box which played all those other games
nobody played anything but ping B and
here we are in uh
67 we've got a demonstration going and
the question was now that we got
something what do we do with it yeah
who's the ultimate customer who produces
this thing and my reaction was hell
maybe the Cable business would be
interested and perhaps doing interactive
stuff over the cable imagine it this is
1967 do interactive stuff over the cable
is the answer to my question of what to
do with video games the demo which
you're about to see and hopefully
participating represents some of the
recent developments at Sanders in
participatory
catv catv
gaming but if you look at uh
demonstrations I made in the early 70s
they they concentrated on this business
of doing games uh doing interactive U uh
impulse buying over the cable I did all
that stuff back in the early 70s and I
uh evangelized it throughout the 70s and
I talked to Warners and and other
companies uh that were in the Cable
business and we tried this and we tried
that and it all worked technically but
we were 10 15 20 years too soon yeah
until the web came along a new cable and
did all those things like falling off a
log like technically it work though oh
yeah you know you sit there you're a
client you're watching TV commercial
comes on you push a button it stores U
information so you can pick up the phone
put your your telephone on the acoustic
modem
download that stuff and order the stuff
right with this box when a commercial
comes on which is designed to work in
this impulse buying environment and it
takes a special kind of commercial to do
this which involves some of the
techniques which we call the video modem
and audio modem techniques uh which we
developed here at sandis uh all he does
is pick up his little box push the
button the tape recorder starts the
message the audio message as it comes
out of the speaker of the TV set is
recorded I can now order the goods which
I decided to on impulse decide to order
the night before and I do this by
picking up my telephone and placing it
on the audio modem portion of my All
Purpose
box I push the appropriate digital
numbers on my
keyboard dial up an 800 number and
automatically the tape recorder will
start running it will play back back
last night's recorded message which
contains all the necessary information
in coded form and all this Zips out over
the telephone line and is recorded at
the other end by appropriate equipment
possibly by a computer controlled uh
machine I promoted that for a while
didn't go anywhere either
so I mean life is 10% success 90% try
this try that try the other thing looks
great sounds great works great doesn't
go anywhere
that's so it
goes meanwhile back at the ranch uh we U
demonstrated the brown box which was the
end of seven different models of video
games we built in the lab to uh in 1969
to RCA Sylvania Motorola
GE uh I forgot a few others uh TV game
manufactur everybody said hey this is
creative it's great nobody came up with
the dime except RCA by the time we got
through negotiating a contract with
those guys it was so honorous we walked
away from it fortunately for us one of
the members of the team left joined
Magnavox as a VP for marketing and S to
the guys in Fort Wayne at Magnavox
headqu you really ought to look at that
again so offway out of Fort Wayne Jerry
Martin who ran the uh uh the television
uh receiver and phonograph and radio
division said it's a goal just like that
one guy with vision and then they had
the engineers had a year to convert the
brownbox into what became the magnabox
Odyssey game of
1972
analogic and
geography Odyssey comes complete with 12
electronic games and educational
experiences many more are optionally
available like a shooting gallery a
prehistoric Safari Odyssey is an
electronic teacher Odyssey is a total
play in learning experience for all
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ages Odyssey it's new from magnabox
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Odyssey Odyssey is an electronic teacher
Odyssey is a total play and learning
experience for all
[Music]
ages Odyssey it's new from magnabox
[Music]
you want want me to play Simon game yeah
that's happens I have batteries inent it
my sure coincidence haven't been
robbed okay here we go uh Atari had
built this upright box called touch me
which had four big buttons on and plays
a game very similar to Simon or vice
versa I saw that and the execution was
not well it was a dark cabinet it made
ugly sounds but the game play was great
so I said to um Howard Morrison one of
the partners at uh at Marvin glass we
ought to do a game like that and then I
faked one without a processor and they
play that they say hey this is pretty
good let's um let's do this and that um
I talked to Lenny cop who was my
assistant at Sanders and who worked for
me on stuff after hours and they said
let's emulate this thing and uh Lenny
programmed this thing with my inputs and
how m input I I kept building the
hardware and I did things like uh decide
the uh the tones that went into Simon
you have to have four tones that are
consonant with each other that that
don't sound dissonant when you play them
in any sequence turns out I went through
my kids uh
encyclopedia U the Compton encyclopedia
I found that the bugle plays everything
with g c e and G so that's what went
into Assignment and part of what made
Simon successful is because it sounded
[Music]
good I deliberately did that otherwise
I'd be here forever uh what's your best
Simon what's my best go who knows uh I'm
sure I could go quite a distance back in
the distance past uh I got invited uh to
the official demonstration assignment to
the press in New York we were at the
wall of a story the night before they
take us by Limu to Club 57 is it or 54
downtown someplace I go in there and
there's the lights blinking on the
ceiling you and people dancing on the
floor about a foot off the floor because
everybody was on kind some kind of
substance and about 1:00 in the morning
finally a huge Simon fled across the
ceiling there and the marketing manager
got out of there had us Spiel there this
time most of us were up on the third
floor was once the theater I don't know
what they accomplished with that but
they showed it to the Press but it was
such a natural game that it took off
like Gang
Busters and this thing had two uh two
Des cells in
it because the uh the lights in here
this is pre- Led days today Marin Simons
run off three aaa's they speak they sing
they talk they all my walls off the
table they do all sorts of things but
this yeah this poor thing had to work
off a four bit processor with one k of
memory one k of four bit
memory that wasn't easy I come with come
up with game
ideas whose
technology attracts me for example uh
there's a Doral over here I did a Doral
it's outside and the the display area uh
you can hold a flash card out in front
of her and she reads the flash card she
does this say this is a dog right got a
picture of a dog why does it interest me
how do I read a flash card of a
distance I do that by generating a a
light of a line of ir that sweeps across
space focused reads a barcode with ir
absorbing ink on the card sends the I
light back that's got the code on it
which is received by or I receiver in an
amulet that she wears around her neck
and then she speaks whatever whatever it
says on the card it's a technical
challenge so I start come up with the
idea of doing this and once I'm on that
I want to build it and
finish that's a vehicle the whole thing
was to build something like a uh a not
only remote control but something that
reads the speed of the vehicle but I
don't think this one has bad Reon my
grandkids come here and they burn up all
the
batteries production items I don't have
the originals that we
did let's get to
work now let's go the other
way that's the way to build it yeah
ideas are ideas executing them isn't the
hardest thing in the world selling the
stuff that's the hard point I will no
longer attempt to work in High real
high-tech area it's impossible I cannot
compete with 100 people in the media lab
at MIT and a similar number at County G
melon and all over the place in Austin
Texas doing their thing all day long
impossible so I do but am monst to
20-year-old technology with creative uh
regurgitation of things that have been
done before slight variations on the
theme of hiding just to keep my Noggin
going keep from getting mentally
defective do a little software on the
computer behind me do Hardware have fun
building stuff there's a game over there
I built
recently it's got a couple of
microprocessors in it let's see if we
can get it to work this one guy shooting
at another you're out try again you
missed I got him you missed oh shs you
missed got
him got
him got him I'm getting pretty good at
this is this going anywhere no it's just
for
me just packaging this thing you know a
little bit of a challenge squeezing
everything in the box there a AFF sensor
here so when you get too close it says
back off
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know
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oh