Who’s your daddy?
Smack talk started with SIMON inventor

By John “Q� Andrews jandrews@hippopress.comm

Widely known as the “father of video games,� Ralph Baer of Manchester first developed the concept of using an ordinary television set interactively to display games in 1966 while working for Sanders. His “Brown Box� prototype, which used simple squares and lines to display games like ping-pong, hockey and racquetball, was released to the world as Magnavox’s Odyssey game console in 1972. The more famous PONG arcade game, put out by Atari, became the fulcrum of a legal battle between the two companies, which ended when Atari agreed to license the technology from Magnavox. PONG was released in a home version with simpler controls than those of the then-discontinued Odyssey in 1975.

Baer also invented SIMON, the handheld, single-chip game requiring players to mimic its musical pattern. He amassed a huge number of patents and many toys that made it to market, including Ideal Toy’s Maniac, Coleco’s Amazatron, Yes! Entertainment’s TV Teddy and Hasbro’s Talkin’ Tools. A large collection of documents, prototypes and replicas of Baer’s is in the Smithsonian’s collection, and his book, Video Games: In The Beginning, was published in 2005.

Before his electronics career, Baer served as an engineer and military intelligence in World War II in Europe, starting a small arms exhibit and teaching soldiers about the enemy’s weapons. The exhibit was brought to the United States after the war, where it was broken up and displayed in various locations.

Baer is speaking at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in Collings Auditorium at Daniel Webster College, 20 University Dr., Nashua.

What brought you to Manchester originally?
A company we started in New York. We were successful, got lots of contracts, but didn’t have the money to go forward, so we needed some holding company to buy us out. Found a company that had a place in Massachusetts, and another one that had just moved up here. It was the biggest electronic sheet metal company in the country, Insuline. They moved into the building on Granite Street. Of course, there were several levels of that building that were totally unoccupied, so next thing we know, we’re packing our stuff up on downtown Spring Street in New York, and we’re moving to — Manchester, N.H.? Where the hell is that? Some place on the way up to the White Mountains?

I heard that you were going to be speaking at Daniel Webster College. How did that come about?
Well, they needed a speaker, so they called on me. I’m getting used to being in the limelight. It’s beginning to occupy entirely too much of my time; I can’t get anything done. I was just in Washington ... I was down in the bowels of the American History Museum, the Smithsonian, filming a segment for The Stories of the Vault, which is a series of things they do about things that are down in the vaults and may not see the light of day for who knows how many years, because they’re limited in space upstairs. The Smithsonian has all my original video game hardware, so we talked about the Brown Box, which was the last of the series of games we built at Sanders.

How did you get into electronics?
I came to New York from Germany in ’38, just ahead of the hangman. When I got there, I started work in a factory for my mother’s cousin’s husband in downtown New York. On the subway to work, I saw somebody with a magazine. On that back page of the magazine, there was an ad for the National Radio Institute in Washington, D.C. The headline was, “Make big money in radio and television servicing.� That was me. I was 16 then. I’d already been out of school after Hitler threw us out of school at age 14 ... Once I finished the correspondence course, I took the advanced correspondence course. Once that was done, it didn’t take long — in less than a year, I was out of the factory.

Did you work on [your inventions] and then sell them, or were you contracted?
Some of them, I was the outside electronics capability for Marvin Glass and Associates; they were the biggest independent toy and game designers in the country, in Chicago. I worked with them for the better part of 10 years. I came up with ideas, worked on them like in the case of all these single-chip microprocessor games. I had a fellow who worked for me at Sanders do the software, which was hard to do in those days: paper tape readers and working through the telephone wire on some computer at 110 baud a second. But all those things got licensed ... The marketeers deserve to drive the Cadillacs they drive. Us engineers drive Chevys. That’s the order of things. Without them, we’d be working our ass off going nowhere.