Games on Your TV?

Computers in the early 1960s weren’t strong on graphics. So Ralph Baer, an engineer and division manager at Sanders Associates, came up with an alternative.

Tinkering in his spare time, Baer developed a home gaming system in 1966 built in a brown box. He called it “Brown Box.” The device, more innovative than its name, used a standard TV as its display.

Magnavox bought Baer’s design and in 1972 released the TV-based Odyssey game system. It sold poorly, however, thanks partly to inadequate marketing, partly to a misconception that it worked only on Magnavox TVs. Odyssey sales recovered, however, after a successful advertising campaign and over 350,000 Odysseys were sold.

"You Are Standing at the End of a Road..."

Will Crowther wanted to create a game for his daughters in 1975. He used FORTRAN on a PDP-10 timesharing system to write a text-based role-playing game set in a cave. Crowther borrowed elements from Dungeons & Dragons, created a cavern based on a Kentucky cave he knew as a spelunker, and called it Adventure.

Adventure spread quickly through universities and labs. At Stanford, Dan Woods enjoyed the game so much that he got Crowther’s permission to expand it, creating a version that blazed through the ARPAnet and was later adapted to varied systems.