Episode Details

In August 1966, engineer Ralph H. Baer was waiting for a bus in New York City when an idea he had first pitched in 1951 came rushing back: let television viewers control what happens on the screen. This episode tells how Baer, then head of the equipment design division at defense contractor Sanders Associates, wrote a four-page proposal for Channel LP, commandeered an empty room, and secretly built a prototype with technician Bob Tremblay before R&D director Herbert Campman gave him a $2,500 budget to make it official.

We follow the hardware-only design process, Bill Rusch's breakthrough of adding a third machine-controlled dot that made ping-pong possible, and the seventh prototype, the wood-grain Brown Box, finished in January 1969. Then comes the search for a manufacturer, the 1971 deal with Magnavox, the compromises that removed color and added dice, poker chips, and screen overlays, the 1972 Odyssey launch at nearly $100, the dealership-only marketing that confused consumers, and Nolan Bushnell's visit to a May 1972 demonstration shortly before Atari created Pong. The episode ends with the patents that earned Magnavox and Sanders over $100 million and the raster-display argument that defeated Nintendo's challenge.

• Why Loral Electronics rejected Baer's 1951 pitch to make televisions interactive
• How games were built with logic gates and circuits rather than code, from a bucket-filling game to a light rifle
• Why Magnavox dropped color output to avoid FCC testing and bundled board game pieces with the console
• How Pong's arcade popularity boosted Odyssey sales, which reached around 350,000 units before its 1975 discontinuation
• Baer's recognition, including the 2004 National Medal of Technology and prototypes held at the Smithsonian