1967 – Early TV Game Development
In early February of ’67 I brought Bill Harrison on board the TV game project. Bill was then a technician, later an engineering associate. He worked in my equipment design division. A couple of years earlier, we had briefly worked together on a quick reaction program called „Brandy“. That involved putting together a pile of hardware to allow us to monitor Russian radio transmissions in occupied Berlin. I got to like Bill and respect his abilities during that crash and burn project. He was an excellent technician, good at transistorized circuit design, good with his hands and ultra reliable. My kind of guy! So I just commandered him off whatever other work he was doing at the time.
I arranged for him to move into a small room on the fifth floor of Sanders‘ Canal Street building in Nashua, immediately opposite the elevator. That room had once been the company’s library during the early days of Sanders. I gave him the key to the door. We had a bench placed along one wall, a desk and a couple of metal storage cabinets, some chair pretty much filled up the small space. We moved in some test equipment and Bill started by reviewing what Tremblay and I had done so far.
A couple of days later I told Bill to go out and buy a plastic toy pistol. He converted that into a light-sensitive gun that could be pointed at the TV screen where we displayed one of or more of our „spots“. However, this „gun“ was not used for shooting at targets; instead, we used it to decode data which we nested in our screen „spots“. That novel scheme allowed us to play multiple choice games. Playing interactive games or quizes with coded spots was to become one of the first of my TV game related patents, USP No. 3,599,221 which we filed in March of 1968.
For the next several months, Bill Harrison and I worked to improve the design of the circuits required to play chase games and code detecting gun games. We built better horizontal and vertical sync circuits, we improved the designs of our modulator and transmitter, our color background generator and so forth. Bill’s daily log indicates that on May 18th we played the first two player game: Bill won! He recorded this event but politely „refused“ to identify the winner in his notebook.
By early June we also had a „real“ target shooting light gun that worked well. Again, we asked Herb Campman to come up to our small room on the fifth floor so we could demonstrate to him how far we had progressed. With Herb came Louis Etlinger, our corporate patent counsel. They visited us on the 14th. Herb first „fired“ the gun from the shoulder, aiming at the target spot on the TV set, some ten feet distant. When he got good at that, he fired the „gun“ from the hip. He got pretty good at that too. I don’t remember whether Lou played the games hands on, also. We must have impressed both Herb and Lou because new R&D money was made available to continue the project.
Soon we were ready to make a major demonstration to Sanders senior management. The seven games we planned to show included a „chess“ game, a „steeple chase“ game, a „fox and hounds“ chase game using two spots and a „bucket filling“ game. We also had a real target shooting gun game using our converted toy rifle, there was a „color guessing“ game for preschoolers, and finally, a „fire fighters“ game which required moving a „pump“ handle up and down fast enough to keep a „house“ from „catching on fire“.
I wanted to make absolutely sure that we would not „blow“ the demo: After all, our audience would be Royden Sanders, the company’s president and Harold Pope, the executive VP of the company to whom I reported at the time as a division manager. We also expected another VP, Dan Chisholm and several members of the board of directors who happened to be in town for a directors‘ meeting during the week the demo was scheduled to take place. This was not the time and place to screw up!
To make sure all the game demos would flow smoothly, I tape recorded verbal comments describing each game before we played it. We had also designed and built some circuitry for adding the sound signals from the tape recorder to the video signal of our game box. That ensured that my pre-recorded voice announcements describing each of the games would come from the speaker of our RCA color TV set. All that worked like a charm and impressed everyone present at the demo. It was a neat techniques demo … even in retrospect. What we had was a video game with canned voice announcements introducing each game in detail!
The demonstrations went well. The project was allowed to continue despite currently many unanswered questions about where it might lead commercially.
Management’s edict now became: „Build something we can sell or license“. My response to that was a plan to develop a simple but interesting game that could be sold for twenty-five dollars. We were told to get a move on and get it done!