If I learned anything from the Army, it was about being able to get things done, no matter how tough the assignment, and it served me later in life.
Ralph H. Baer
People love video games because they do things they obviously can't do in real life. That's especially true with sports games because fans love to step into the shoes of their favorite athletes.
Coming up with ideas isn't hard. The real challenge is finding the time to actually build something and then finding a home for it.
For me, inventing video games was just one successful thing I had done among many others.
It's like I'm basically an artist. I'm no different from a painter who sits there and loves what he does.
Never let an engineer try to sell his stuff. It rarely works unless you are Akio Morita.
Most inventions are based on some prior history.
Perhaps at some time in the future, when you ask a friend to come up and look at your etchings, you will plug in your collection of video art.
I had the misfortune of being born in a horrendous situation.
When technology is ready for something novel, when the components needed to build something new become affordable, it is going to be done by someone and more likely by several people.
An entire generation of talented people - engineers, artists, scriptwriters, musicians, programmers - have been busy creating a whole new art form for us. The name of this new game is interactivity.
People thought I was wasting my time and the company's money, for that matter.
'Pong' is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game.
Three cheers for the artistry of the lone designer doing his thing!
All my friends, they're all gone. I've outlived them all.
When you get to be over 80, your coordination goes to hell and a half.
There's nothing in the Bible that says, 'You must play video games.'
When you built television sets, you have all this test equipment. And you'd have all these lines and squares on the screen to test it. So it occurred to me that it might be fun for people to control the lines and squares on the screen.
Coming up with novel ideas and converting them into real products has always been as natural as breathing for me.
The talent curve in game-making is going straight up to Heaven.
That we plug in carts or CDs with megabytes of memory when only yesterday we were happy to have 64K or 128K in our Apple II and PC workhorses... that's nothing short of phenomenal.
Going back to the technical track of my life, note that I have been designing electronic products, both of the consumer and defense electronics variety, since Pluto was a pup. Many of these products broke new ground... creativity at work!
There's no way anybody could have predicted how fast this industry would take off.
In 1966, thoughts about playing games using an ordinary TV set began to percolate in my mind.
By and large, I'm in the same boat as other inventors. If we're lucky, of the 10 or 15 items we do a year, maybe one or two of them wind up with a licensing agreement.
Pong can clearly be credited with having starting the coin-operated arcade videogame industry with a bang!
