Bill Rusch suggested the blip could represent a ball, and the team came up with ideas for various ball games, one of which was Ping-Pong. Ralph and the two engineers soon came up with the idea of a third blip on the screen, one that would be controlled by the circuitry itself, rather than the players.
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The brass was impressed by the demo, which included full color presentations of the two games, and gave permission for the project to continue. This created the effect of a full multimedia presentation when the game box was demonstrated (long before the term "multimedia" was even coined).
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By adding extra circuitry to allow the hookup of a tape recorder to the TV set as well, Ralph played taped descriptions of the games directly out of the TV speaker. By June of that year, they did their first actual demo for Sanders' top brass. In May, another engineer by the name of Bill Rusch joined the team, and they all started brainstorming on more games that they could design their game box to play. The team showed off the gun at another demo session with the director of R&D, who gave them permission to continue and more funding, which allowed them to further refine the electronics. Baer and Tremblay demonstrated the game to Sanders' Director of R&D, who had Ralph write a memo asking for funds, and the project soon became "official." By January of 1967, Bill Harrison was added to the project and they began work on a "light gun," a modified toy gun that you could use to shoot at dots on the screen to make them disappear. Within a month, they had a primitive prototype working that put two spots on the TV screen and allowed play of a "game" of sorts that Ralph called "Fox and Hounds." One blip could be made to chase the other (the hound chasing the fox), and the chaser would win when he touched the other blip. Now in a position to do something about it (though still not officially), Ralph jotted down plans and schematics, and had one of his technicians, Bob Tremblay, begin work on the circuits. homes, instead of a television set that could play games, it made more sense to build an device that could play games on any TV set in any household. Now that TV sets were much more common in U.S. During September of that year, the television game idea returned to Ralph's thoughts, only it had evolved with the times.
Move forward to 1966, when Ralph is Chief Engineer and Manager of the Equipment Design division at Sanders Electronics, who was under contract with the military to develop and build various electronic equipment. The idea was canned immediately by the managers, but not removed from Ralph's mind. Given the assignment of building the best TV system in the world, he submitted the idea that the TV should include innovative concepts - one of which was the ability to play games. Ralph first came up with the idea for video games in 1951 when working at an early TV manufacturer by the name of Loral. While many consider Nolan Bushnell, the enigmatic founder of Atari, to be the father of the video games, this title should actually go to Baer. The Odyssey was invented by an electrical engineer named Ralph Baer. While the home version of Pong is the system most often remembered by video game players who had their first experience in the '70s, the original home video game system (and the system responsible for inspiring both Atari's coin-op and home versions of Pong) was the Magnavox Odyssey. The very first videogame console! What? I thought that was Atari's Pong? Nope.
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