1967.Game — A Gaming Documentary Series
Come with us on a journey trough the ages, as we cover a half a century of video games, starting from the first video game console and to the present day. In this episode we’ll see what the year 1967 had to offer and see gaming take shape in the dreams of a man named Ralph Baer and his Brown Box.
Every one of us plays games. We’ve played them when we were kids, we play them now, we played them when we swam in the shallow waters off the coast of Africa, before we discovered fire. We played them before we were even people. Because games are universal. Every creature on earth that has reached a certain level of brain power plays them. They are an integral part of any society. And today we’re going on a journey through a history. Not of all games, but through their most recent incarnation. Video Games.
It can be said that they began in 1958, 60 years ago, with Tennis for Two. A game designed by William Higinbotham and put together with the help of Robert V. Dvorak. It ran on an oscilloscope, like the very one you see in the intro of this show. There were tick tack toe games before it, and simpler concepts that can be considered proto-videogames before it. But this is where it began. And after it came Spacewar! That in 1962 lit up PDP-1 mainframes, thanks to the work of Steve Russell. And yet, gaming itself, as a phenomenon, as a potential industry, as a part of our daily lives did not start then. It started with a man named Ralph Baer in the year 1967.
Welcome to a show that aims to explore his legacy. Over the course of this year, through 52 shows, or however many it will take, we will cover each and every year that has passed since the creation of the first video game console. And in each show we will cover what games were released, what the most important games were, what were the games that defined that year, as well as explore what events birthed and shaped the gaming industry. And along the way I’ll do my best to give you some context about the world around us, because nothing exists in a vacuum. Although, technically, space is kind-of a vacuum, and we exist in it, but that’s besides the point. So we begin today with the year 1967, with Ralph Baer and his inventions, most notably The Brown Box.
It was a very different time, and if you were to go back, you’d probably not recognize society… unless you come from Eastern Europe, in which case you’ll be right at home for the most part. For one, you could buy a brand new house for 14.000 dollars in the United States of America, and people got along with earning a minimum of 1.4 dollars an hour. Which is still a higher wage than what I got from most of my jobs up until 2012. As it happens, it’s the year when the UK decided it wanted to join the common European market. It was a time of hope for some, what with Romania’s first highway beginning construction then. It is still one of our only highways. And it was a time of strife for others, the Vietnam War still going on.
Yet, there were many achievements for society. It’s the year the first successful heart transplant was performed, giving people a new lease on life. The first ATM went into service, giving people less head-aches at the bank. And it was the year when people dreamed of super-sonic commercial flight, anticipating a fleet of over 350 Concordes by 1980. People loved to dream of such a great future. And Ralph Bear was one of those dreamers.
He saw a future in which people could use their televisions for something other than just watching The Flintstones, or Get Smart. Though why someone wouldn’t want to watch Get Smart is beyond me. But keep in mind, this comes from someone who lived in a country where TV was rationed out to two hours a day, filled with propaganda. Yet, think about the world today. How often do you use your TV just to watch a TV Channel. We have televisions that even on their own, without needing to be connected to a brown box, are able to deliver content and experiences that go beyond simple television. And it started with something called TV Game Unit #1, in 1967. A simple box with what today we would call simple electronics and vacuum tubes that allowed a user to interact with a simple effect generated on the TV screen. Through subsequent refinements we finally got to the TV Game Unit #7, better known as The Brown Box.
Although the most popular game on it was Ping Pong, which would later go on to be turned into Pong and kickoff the video games industry, the Brown Box was capable of much more than that. Through the switches on the front, the user could switch between multiple games, like checkers, handball and a few other. These games weren’t what you would call advanced, by today’s standard. They were basic in their construction and relied a lot on direct user put a spin on the ball after it was deflected, and it didn’t have a scoring system, or a rules system. The players had to keep a record of these, which wasn’t that much of a bother. Especially since there weren’t a lot of players. The Brown Box was not a commercial device. It was not sold on its own, it was not commercialized in the ’60. We’ll have to wait a few years until it is turned into the Magnavox Odyssey. So be sure to keep an eye out for it in a few weeks. But it did turn heads, it did draw attention. It was the inception to something that 50 years later would bring joy to billions of people
As for what was the game that best described this year, well, it would have to be Ping Pong. It’s where the idea of video games as something that people would want began. It was the starting point. Because Ping Ping in an electronic environment was easier to play than actual Ping Pong, but still had the exact same amount of exhilaration in it. The same amount of competitiveness. It sold itself, by the mere action of playing. You didn’t have to explain it to people, you didn’t have to market it to them. You just let them play it, and they wanted ti play it. They wanted to play it so much that we got a video games industry because of it. It’s the reason we’ll get to Pong in a few weeks, and after that into an age where the video games industry wasn’t just a man with a passion for having something other than a television channel on his TV.
Come back next week when we’ll continue the journey through the ages and see what became of Ralph Baers dream. Goodbye.
