Page 57 - OSG Presents Classic Gamer Magazine #5
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• According to Baer, Bushnell pre-
ferred to have Magnavox keep
"the riffraff" out of the video
game industry than fight their
duced with official credit lawsuit.
to the programmer and an officially
approved Easter egg. • Magnavox was still in liti-
games" for his invention of what gation with other companies for
eventually became the original video game patent violations
Joe Decuir Magnavox Odyssey (the world's (related to the Magnavox Odys-
first home video game console), sey) as recently as 1997. (Notably
• Decuir, one of the primary design- had the idea for a machine- Taito and Data East.)
ers of the Atari 2600 hardware, controlled ball. Up till then, it was
didn't know there was an Atari controlled manually by a person. • Baer is hesitant to donate the
2600 light gun game released "Brown Box" Odyssey prototype to
(Sentinel), but knew it was possi- • The original use of what would be- the Smithsonian because they
ble to create one. come the Magnavox Odyssey light have so many exhibits. However,
gun was for quiz games. Each there's an inventor's museum that
• Decuir wishes he had patented the spot on the TV could be encoded he may donate it to. He believes it
color-cycling used in Atari 2600 somehow so that the machine should be available to be played
games to prevent burn-in, but in knew which answer the user se- by visitors wherever it ends up.
his words, “they didn't think you lected (or at least if it was correct
could patent software back then.” or not).
• It was two Scottish men who
had the idea for "pong-on-a-chip"
• Decuir's mother was proud be- at General Instruments.
cause color-cycling was the rea-
son Consumer Reports gave the Sanders Associates, the com-
Atari 2600 the highest ranking •
when they reviewed home video pany Baer worked for when he
game consoles. invented the home video game
console, made about four arcade
games that did well. They then
• Decuir's then 13-year-old brother made elaborate plans for the fu-
"kicked his ass" at Combat, even ture that fell apart in the end.
though Decuir had created the
game.
Miscellaneous
• In retrospect, Decuir admits that
saving five cents per 2600 con- Hasbro Interactive was ap-
sole by using a 24-pin instead of •
proached by Columbia (or who-
30-pin chip was a mistake. Using ever owns it now) about including
a 30-pin chip would have allowed a copy of the Krull Atari 2600
the creation of games larger than game on the upcoming Krull DVD.
4K without having to resort to I don't know how they plan to use
bank-switching.
it (an emulator on a DVD player?)
• The Atari 2600 used chips with 15 or what the results of this request
micron circuits. The Microsoft X- were.
Box, which Decuir is currently
helping design, uses .015 micron • You may have noticed inter-
chips. That's 1000 times smaller! esting happenings at Twin Galax-
ies, such as a redesigned web
• The original Atari 2600 consoles site and the advent of shooting
were heavy on purpose. Atari felt their own video footage. It turns
consumers would feel ripped off if • Ralph Baer said his idea for send- out that Twin Galaxies now has a
they paid $200 for it and it weighed ing games via cable (TV) was 30 billionaire investor. Before this
almost nothing. years too soon. (He was compar- individual came along, Twin Galax-
ing it to playing games via the ies was on the verge of going un-
• Atari ultimately decided not to build World Wide Web.) der.
speakers into the 2600 for two rea-
sons. First was the extra cost. Approximately 20,000 Odyssey And there you have it. A concise list
Second was that by using the tele- • light rifles were sold compared to of the things I learned at CGE 2000,
vision speaker, consumers had 95,000-100,000 consoles. from the trivial to the slightly less trivial.
built-in volume control. I hope those of you who attended
In court, some companies claimed learned many things as well and that
• that because their "pongs" were both those who did and didn't will bene-
Ralph Baer digital, they were therefore com- fit, in some bizarre way, from this arti-
pletely different from the analog cle. Even you, Leonard.
• It was not until 1967 that Baer, Odyssey. (This didn't hold up.)
who is called "the father of video
Classic Gamer Magazine December 2000 57
