BOMBS, BOOBS & BURGERS

Video games are huge business these days - huger than Hollywood, in fact. Companies such as Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and Electronic Arts are raking it as a result. But in the early days, it was a defense contractor that got rich off video games.

In 1972, a TV engineer named Ralph Baer built the very first home video game system called the Brown Box. It hooked up to the TV and allowed players to control blobs of light with a handheld controller. By today's standards, the game would have been fun for all of two seconds, but in those pre-historic days, it was a huge technological breakthrough. Video games were, after all, the first real demonstration of computing power that the general public could get its hands on.

Baer wasn't just a tinkerer, however. In his day job, he designed weapons systems for Sanders Associates, a defense contractor in Nashua, New Hampshire. He designed the Brown Box in his spare time, but his contract with Sanders stipulated that all of his inventions would be patented in the name of the company. The patent for video games came in 1973 and Sanders licensed the technology to Magnavox, which released the Brown Box under its own name, the Odyssey:



The console sold poorly because of poor marketing, but it served as the inspiration for the Atari Pong and 2600 consoles, both of which were big hits. Sanders then spent a good portion of the 1980s suing the likes of Atari, Activision and Nintendo to protect its patent, and pretty much won through judgment or settlement in every case.

The bottom line: for the 17-year life span of the patent, every video game made until 1990 paid a licensing fee to Sanders, which is now owned by British defense firm BAE Systems. No wonder there's so much shooting and destruction in video games!