Playing the original home video game with the man who developed it

Ralph Baer of Manchester oversaw development of what became Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game, back in the late 1960s when he was working at Sanders Associates, a defense electronics firm in Nashua. I've written about him a few times, since before he won the National Medal of Technology, and I'm going to be revisiting him in an upcoming story. The Web story will include an original TV commercial for Odyssey, in all its cheezy glory.

I went to his home and I got to play him in "TV tennis" (not Pong, the name used by his arch-enemy Nolan Bushnell of Atari) on a version of the original "brown box" device. the 90-year-old Baer was, to put it mildly, better than me.