Cable Games
My first approach was that playing games at home on a TV set might be of interest to the nascent cable television Industry. The idea behind this thought went something like this: Cable TV was in trouble; it was growing entirely too slowly in major US cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles … it needed a shot in the arm. I thought that perhaps playing games with the aid of the „cable“ might be just what was needed.
Technically speaking, the concept was this: The cable company would provide colorful backgrounds for our games. We would create the action. As can be appreciated now, the state of the art in the ’60s simply did not allow us to generate good background graphics within a low cost game box. The best we could do was to draw a line down the middle representing a „tennis net“, or a line at left side – a „wall“ for a handball game, for example. That was it!
On the other hand, any cable station could easily transmit the top view of a tennis court complete with spectator stands, all in „living color“. All that was needed was to point a color camera at a poster tacked up on a wall, displaying the desired graphics. Our white player and ball spots could then be superimposed electronically on this colorful, complex background and the result would be a rich looking screen presentation.
Towards the end of 1967 we had acted on this concept by adding novel circuitry to our ping-pong and gun games demonstration unit. These changes allowed the game unit’s spot generating hardware to work synchronously with a cable signal. To emulate a cable signal, we pointed a small video camera at a set of flip charts sitting on an easel.
By January of 1968, we had all that working like a charm. Cold turkey, I decided to place a phone call to TelePrompTer Corporation in New York. They were the largest cable company in the US at the time, with some 60,000 household wired up, if I remember right. Eventually, I got through to Hubert Schlafly, a VP at TelePrompTer. He was interested enough in the possibilities of „cable games“ to set a date for a visit to New Hampshire, the 18th of January.
When Hub Schlafly came up to Nashua, we gave him a good demo of what cable games might be like: We had sports games including ping-pong and soccer; we had chase games, checker-like games as well as target shooting gun games, all played against suitable faux cable background provided by our camera.
Mr. Schlafly was sufficiently impressed to persuade Irving Kahn, TelePrompTer’s president, to come up to Nashua for a demo in early in February. He visited us on the 13th and also liked what he saw. The scene appeared to be set to move into cable games in cooperation with the largest cable outfit anywhere … progress on the business front!
Thereafter, I made a number of trips to New York City to the TP headquarters to help develop a plan of action for our two companies. Lou Etlinger and Hub Schlafly began to negotiate an agreement based on a detailed proposal of who did what, which I had cobbled up. It began to look like I had found a solution to our marketing problem.
Now, my cable game concepts were intended to „spark“ renewed interest in cable TV, especially since at that time all of the cable TV companies (including TelePrompTer) were in the midst of financial problems. Their difficulties paralleled those of the generally depressed business conditions of the late ’60s and early ’70s. Unfortunately, the cable business got worse and worse. What was to have been a concerted, cooperative effort between Sanders and TelePrompTer fizzled for lack of funding, thus aborting the first attempt in the history of civilization to play games over the cable … and we, at Sanders Associates, were back to square one!
Bill Rusch left the TV game development project somewhere along the line in the fall of 1968. Harrison stayed on. Over the next several months, he and I continued to spend time on improving our games. We developed better performing hardware and added new sports games. These included handball and volleyball variations on the theme of ping-pong. In actual fact, it was mostly Bill Harrison who did the work. I was busy managing the equipment design division with its several hundred personnel. Naturally, I only had time to stop by our small TV game lab once or twice a day for a few minutes to confer with Bill and keep the effort on track. He did the work and he did it well.
1969 – Demonstrating Our Brown Bow And Trying To Find Licensee