Ralph Baer, inventor of the Brown Box game system, and Al Alcorn, creator of Pong, entertained a crowd of onlookers at Game Developers Conference eager to see how the two industry icons spawned a video game revolution.

Baer kicked off the hour-long session with a lengthy introduction to his background in his radio television, and military careers. (He worked as an electronics engineer in the military.) He had the idea for putting games on television screens as early as 1951 after noticing how much test patterns resembled board games. After being shot down by the higher-ups, Baer shelved his ideas for 15 years.

It wasn't until 1966 that he confirmed his idea that manipulating patterns on a television screen was fun. Not long after, the first video game patent was filed, and from it Baer's company earned a lot of money through licensing and by winning many patent infringement lawsuits. One company in particular that Baer remembers engaging over with his patent was Activision, which filed multiple appeals in an attempt to avoid paying patent licensing fees. As it turned out Baer never collected from them: he said "they went broke," which got a laugh out of the audience.

Baer eventually spawned the Brown Box, which was a simple game system featuring two three-dial controllers and simple games like ping pong and light gun shooting. Baer showed the audience a video of his 1968 self-demonstration of the ping pong game, playing against the builder and designer of the Brown Box, Bill Harrison. (Harrison won, 3-2.) Brown Box eventually became the Maganvox Odyssey, which sold 330,000 units over its two-plus year lifetime and was considered a success.

Alcorn took the microphone for the second half of the session and began by talking about his entry into the field of electronic arcade games. Under the wing of Nolan Bushnell, Alcorn was asked to build a simple game that he thought would become a full-fledged product. Instead, Bushnell had intended for Alcorn's design to be a throw-away, or practice for a larger, more complicated game that Bushnell thought would be the next big thing.

Alcorn's simple game turned out to be Pong, which became the phenomenon of its time. Alcorn glowingly described the reception of the game, saying how men and women could play together without any problems. Pong was a very social game, Alcorn said, where everyone could gather around the Pong machine and have a good time together. That was good business for pinball arcade operators, because Alcorn's machine could command and justify the 25-cent cost to play, where at the time pinball machines only cost a dime.

With the success of Pong in the arcades, Alcorn and Bushnell decided to take it to the home television set. Alcorn thought, "why haven't the arcade giants of the day (Midway, Bally) tried to make home games?" The difficult process that was ahead of Alcorn made the reason slightly more clear: silicon and microprocessors had very thin profit margins, if they were to be sold at a reasonable price. How would it be marketed? Who would distribute it?

Alcorn likened the process of making Pong for the home like a dog chasing a car. "What do you do when you catch it?" he said. None of the major electronics manufacturers would listen to what he had to say. But then Alcorn got "very lucky:" Sears/Roebucks' sporting goods department decided to sell the Pong machines, and would also take care of the marketing, distribution, and…basically, everything. Alcorn said Sears "just sent us checks."

The talks shifted to the VCS, one of the first cartridge-based systems (though not the first). It was purposefully designed to keep costs down, which meant it had little to no hardware support for games. Though the cartridges meant developers could be flexible with what they could put on the screen, it was extremely difficult to program for. There was no frame buffer and the machine could only output two lines of video at a time. Alcorn said that to make games for it, "you had to be a coder." He realized that with the limiting hardware, developers were required to be creative in order to make compelling games. Too much hardware, Alcorn said, constrains creativity.

When talking about his experiences with Pong and the games he helped to create in its aftermath, Alcorn sounded a lot Nintendo when it was touting the Wii. Nintendo World Report asked Alcorn about what he thought about the Wii and if it had any similarities to Pong. While he didn't specifically answer the second part of the question, he did have good things to say about Nintendo's console.

"I enjoy the Wii," he said. I like [the simple] aspect of it. I'm not good anymore at the more difficult games. I let my kids do that. But my wife and I do enjoy playing it."

Alcorn went on to compare game making back then with game making today. "One of the problems now is that you're talking ten [or] twenty-million dollar budgets for a big game, so it's very hard to take risks," he said. "Every time we would do a game in the old days, [quality] would be all over the map. But you can't do that now."

He concluded, "I appreciate the courage and the risk that Nintendo took to go that way, and they've achieved a lot of success. But that doesn't mean it's the only way to go. I love the graphics of the new machines. They're just phenomenal. It's amazing."

At the end of the hour, video game composer and session presenter Tommy Tallarico surprised Ralph Baer with a Guinness World Record award for the inventor of the home video game console.