Winter Of 1972/73 – Upgrading Odyssey
Having suffered through the strengths and weaknesses of the Odyssey roll out and the machine’s performance, I knew what I had do next: I had to do my utmost to help Magnavox add improvements to the product that would increase its appeal. The ultimate motive was, of course, to increase potential license income to Sanders from Magnavox so as to keep Sanders management happy.
In the ensuing winter months I spent after hours in my home lab working on improving Odyssey. Taking a leaf from Pong it was obvious that future Odyssey models would need sound and scoring. The latter seemed out of reach, pricewise, but sound was entirely feasible. I got busy and designed a small box that plugged into the Odyssey base unit, detected coincidence signals between the „ball“ and „paddle“ symbols and produced a „pong“ like sound via a built-in speaker.
When the sound unit was completed, we showed it to Magnavox. The response was the first encounter with what was to become Magnavox‘ recurrent bouts of doubt about their future in the video game business. Nobody paid any real attention to my sound accessory … Magnavox was busy selling off Odyssey inventory. Senior management was not certain whether there would be another production run of that product! I was not a happy camper!
That was only the first of a long string of disappointments with our Magnavox association. The next came when I showed them several novel games I had developed. The games were made possible by adding „active components“, such as transistors and diodes, to Odyssey’s presently“ passive“ plug-in programming cards. The added active components opened up game possibilities that the basic game circuitry and „old“ card design could not handle. Again, my efforts were received with indifference at Fort Wayne. So much for trying to support our licensee!
An aside: In retrospect, the concept of plugging in a cartridge or card carrying active components to play a video game was absolutely novel. Had I then been as aware of the need for patenting concepts as I became in subsequent years, Sanders would have been able to obtain a patent that might have covered all ROM cartridges when they appeared some years later. A technical and legal case could certainly be made that ROM based plug-in carts for „programming“ video games achieve their objective – presenting game graphics and controlling game flow – by using „active components“ – their Read Only Memories (ROMs). When you get right down to it, a ROM is basically an integrated form of diode and transistor matrices.
License income from that invention could easily have dwarfed what we eventually realized from our basic game licenses and from litigating patent infringement law suits. These started in 1975 and continued off and on for the better part of twenty years. They ended up collecting about a hundred million dollars for Magnavox and Sanders … and the lawyers, of course … you can’t win ‚em all!