The first home video game console used translucent plastic screen overlays
In 1966, television engineer Ralph Baer drew up plans for a device that transformed ordinary televisions into interactive gaming screens. Released in 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first commercial home video game console had no microprocessor. Because its simple analog circuits could only render glowing white blocks against a black background, players had to tape color-printed translucent plastic sheets onto their TV screens to simulate tennis courts, ski runs, and roulette tables.
The Television Without a Program
In August 1966, an engineer named Ralph Baer was waiting at a bus terminal in New York City when an idea occurred to him. At the time, Baer was working as an engineering division manager at Sanders Associates, a defense contractor based in Nashua, New Hampshire. Millions of American households owned cathode-ray tube television sets, but those expensive screens served purely as passive receivers for broadcast signals. Baer wondered whether television owners could take active control of the display, turning an ordinary living room appliance into an interactive playing surface.
When Baer returned to his office, he drafted a four-page proposal outlining the concept of a low-cost device that could attach to the antenna terminals of standard television sets. Sanders Associates had no consumer electronics business, and government defense contracting was its primary revenue source. Nevertheless, Baer secured a modest internal research budget and assigned technicians, including Bill Harrison and later Bill Rusch, to build functional hardware prototypes. Over the next three years, the small engineering group developed a sequence of experimental units designed to test whether electronic circuits could generate movable targets on a standard television screen.
By 1968, the team had constructed its seventh prototype, a woodgrain-covered chassis known colloquially as the Brown Box. The device could generate a playable table tennis match, a chase game, and a target-shooting challenge using a light-detecting rifle peripheral. Having demonstrated that the engineering concept worked, Sanders Associates began pitching the prototype to major television manufacturers in search of a commercial licensing partner, eventually catching the interest of the Magnavox company in 1971.