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PONG-Story

Dedicated to Ralph H. Baer, Inventor of the video game.

As early as 1951, a young 29-year old TV engineer named Ralph Baer worked at Loral, a TV company. His Chief Engineer, Sam Lackoff, asked him to Build the best television set in the world. Designing a TV set was an easy task for Ralph, and he wanted to add a new concept that his boss did not understand: playing games on the television set. The video game concept was born, but could not be implemented since the boss refused the idea. In September 1966, Ralph came back to his 1951 idea of playing games on TV sets and started building the first video game prototypes. Therefore, Ralph Baer is accordingly credited as the inventor of the video game.

Who, I might point out, invented a video game using vacuum tubes.

On September 6th, he drew an elementary schematic of a two-player game that he called a Chase Game. The game consisted of two squares (spots) that could be moved on the screen in both directions by two payers. The schematic also showed how to add color to the playing field.

A few days later, he assigned a technician, Bob Tremblay, to the job of building up a vacuum tube circuit to prove that spots (player symbols) or bars could be easily displayed on a TV screen. To save time, Ralph bought a Heathkit IG-62 television receiver alignment generator, because it contained some of the circuits he needed for his experiment: sync generators, an RF oscillator that could be tuned to TV channels and an RF modulator, needed to place the game video signal on a Channel 3 or 4 RF carrier. This saved some time and cost. The reason why Ralph asked the technician to execute a vaccuum tube design was simple: he was familiar with vacuum tubes. Transistors were still relatively novel and he was not yet comfortable with designing them into television circuitry.

Bob Tremblay finished the work in February 1967; it was now possible to move a single spot around the screen of the Black&White TV set used for the work so far. It was also possible to change the spot’s shape from square to rectangular or stretch it into lines of various lengths.