GS:
Until very recently, people have considered video games to be mostly
for kids. What I want to know is, when you first created the games,
were you developing them with an audience of kids or adults in mind?
RB:
No. Shooting at the screen is fun for anybody up to the age a hundred
and twenty-two. And besides, if you remember, they were all two-player
games to begin with, so it's a matter of family interaction: father and
son, mother-daughter, mother and son.
GS: So from the very beginning, it was a multi-generational...
RB: Yeah, because who watches television? The family watches television, right? So the idea was a family game without it even being defined that way.
Now
that you mention it, I never spoke of it that way. It was just the
natural thing, because who watched television sets? It wasn't fourteen
year-old Johnny in his bedroom with his personal television set,
because hell no, we were lucky to have one goddamn set in the
household, right? So it was a family affair. So the games [were
designed that way] in my mind even without thinking about [them being]
family games.
GS: Did your kids know what you were doing in the '60s with your video games?
RB:
Yes, towards the end when we had more and more finished models, I often
took the stuff home to do troubleshooting on it -- another big no-no in
a military company. "Don't take anything home! It's classified." Not
only did I do that, but I sometimes brought the technician into my lab
at home. I had him work at home. That was an even bigger no-no. But
what people didn't know didn't hurt 'em. [Chuckles]
GS: Did your kids like the games that you were doing?
RB:
Yeah. We played games downstairs in my lab, and the kids played them.
They thought it was pretty neat. I don't think I detected any great
enthusiasm.
GS: Do you think they influenced your designs at all?
RB: No, not at all. Not in the least.
GS: Did any of your kids take after you in becoming engineers?
RB:
My oldest son is an engineer. He puts very fancy electro-optics loads
into satellites. If you remember last year, a satellite was launched
with a payload that impacted on a meteorite up there. His optics were
both in the impact vehicle and up above. So he's a good engineer; very
talented guy, fairly imaginative. But nowhere near what I do.
My
middle guy is Assistant Attorney General in Salt Lake City. My
daughter's pretty creative, an artistic type. But we're all very
different. And none of us are really game players. I'm not a game
player. I love making games because I love to be able to come up with a
design. A concept or a design...
GS: You like the creative process.
RB:
I like the creative process. I'm like a painter, you know -- a portrait
painter or...an artistic painter. And really, what I do is an art form.
The engineering part is a part of it. But after you've done
fifty-thousand different things, most of what you do is a combination
of what you've already done seventeen times before. But the concept of
a game -- that's always new; it's always fresh. I love to do that stuff.
GS: Do you have a favorite video game even though you're not a game player?
RB:
I don't play. Recently, one of my grandsons brought an Xbox with him,
and we played a race game. Well, I couldn't manage that damn thumb
joystick. I was always hitting the walls. I couldn't steer the car
worth a damn. After about fifteen minutes, I said "Forget it , I've had
enough." [Laughs]
More recently, somebody played
a PS2 game with me -- some kind of a game where you sail some kind of a
boat. And I was always hitting the docks and the obstacles -- just
couldn't really control the stuff. At this age, my reflexes are much
too slow. My eyeballs don't work as well as they used to, so I can't
play those games.
GS: Well did you ever enjoy playing them in the past, like in the Atari days?
RB:
Oh, I did in the beginning -- certainly, I did. You know also, the
early Atari -- if you remember reading my book, I built an attachment,
Kid Vid, that plugged into the Atari 2600, which the 2600 turned off
and on under program control, so that for the first time in the history
of humanity, you had real music, you know, and real voices coming off a
tape under control of the computer, the Atari machine. You know, I
loved playing games on that machine.
Once that
period was over...Nintendo? I only played on Nintendo because, right
from the bat, it infringed sixteen ways to Sunday. Including...do you
remember Robby [R.O.B. -Ed.], the little robot that came with it, or
are you too young?
GS: Yeah, I remember it.
RB:
What did Robby do? It looked at the screen, 3-4 feet away, and took
commands -- optical commands -- off the screen, and then raised his
arm, lowered his arm, turned his head, depending upon.... Well, I had
an issued patent for...
GS: The video modem?
RB:
Well, it was similar to the original video modem, yeah. They infringed.
Did we go after them? No point to it because there was not enough money
involved to make it worthwhile.
Meanwhile, they
built games that infringed, so we went after them. Eventually, they
started to settle, then didn't; decided to sue us. [They] got that
sharp law firm in New York to sue us for misinforming the patent
office, which is a Federal offence. But they couldn't prove it in
Federal court in New York, and they lost, and then after that they
settled for some nominal sum like ten or twelve million bucks.
GS: And that's when they brought up that Willy Higinbotham thing?
RB:
Yeah, that's when they used Higinbotham as a witness. What did
Higinbotham do? He put a creative little game on an oscilloscope. Any number of engineers did that before him and after him, including me. And it was just something that's natural, ya know.
The
old oscilloscopes were very tractable in that respect because they had
an accessible y-axis, which is typical to any scope, but also an
accessible x-axis. Nowadays, in most scopes, the x-axis is controlled
by internal sweep generators that make you go across the screen
and...one microsecond, ten microseconds, a millisecond, and all that.
But on the old scopes, you could also move the spot horizontally, so
you basically had an x,y display...
GS: You could just point it to wherever you wanted it to go on the screen.
RB:
...so it was only natural for us to play games with that stuff. Not
only did [Higinbotham] play a game on the scope, but he played it on a
DuMont scope, which was the identical scope I had in my lab at home.
'Cause that's all there was at the time. And then he had, at his
disposal, analog computers that cost a hundred-thousand bucks in those
days, which is what he did all his work on.
So he
had all the tools, he had the scope, and what he did was very
interesting and was ingeniously designed, and it was a lot of fun. So,
did he think of making a product out of it? Did he think of it as
something he could play on a television set? None of the above. And the
judge, of course, recognized all that: he said, "Ah, this is bullshit."
Meanwhile, he got on the map, right? Nobody had ever heard of him
before.