September 1967 – Our First „Product“ Is Ready!
Bill Harrison cranked away at new, improved circuit designs. In September we were essentially finished with a stand alone game box that played several, simple games. Bill made up a list of materials and „priced“ it based on typical US manufactured components. We came up with a direct material cost of about sixteen dollars. That meant that my initial idea of a twenty-five dollar game at retail was rapidly becoming a pipe dream. It was clear we needed better, improved games, to warrant the probable $50 retail price of a TV game … back to the bench!
At about that time, Bill Rusch joined the project. He was an experienced engineer, a MIT graduate, who had been assigned to Herb Campman’s small corporate R&D group. Herb decided that Bill was available and loaned him to our TV game project. Now, Bill Rusch was a very creative guy. Herb figured his presence would speed up progress on our now official video game project. He was right!
Within a few weeks, the concept of a third spot was born. Unlike the two manually controlled spots we had been using so far, this spot was to be machine controlled. Bill Rusch came up with the idea of making that spot into a „ball“ so that we could play some sort of ball game with it. We batted around ideas of how we could implement games such as ping-pong, hockey, football and other sports games.
By this time we’re into October of 1967. Ping-pong, hockey, soccer games were born, at least on paper. Rusch designed some initial circuitry. Then Bill Harrison was called away for some other duties for a couple of months and all bench work stopped. When he returned to the game project, he built up the ping-pong game circuitry and by the early November we had a functional ping-pong game. It was far more interesting than any of the old chase games. Now we were getting somewhere!