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TV POWWW: The 80s Game You Played Through Your Phone

The show was almost called TV Bang, and the reason it was not comes down to acoustics: an engineer discovered that the word "bang" was hard for his hardware to hear, while the letter P in "pow" made a sharp puff of sound a machine could detect. The syndicator sold the format to a roomful of television executives using two televisions and a pair of telephones that were not connected to anything. And the engineer who built the original hardware left the company six months before the show ever aired.

TV Powww was a syndicated segment, launched in 1978, in which a home viewer called a local station, watched a video game on their own television, and shouted "Pow!" into the phone to fire the gun on screen. It was created by Florida syndicator Marvin Kempner, built on Fairchild Channel F hardware, and the voice-activation circuit was patented by Fairchild engineer Richard Olney. It ran on dozens of American stations into the mid-1980s and overseas as late as 1990.

An idea that arrived by way of a broken deal

The origin is documented in Kempner's own 1998 book on his syndication career, and the fullest published account of that chapter is arcade historian Keith Smith's 2014 research piece, which states plainly that it is largely a paraphrase of Kempner's book.

In that telling, two men, a disc jockey and a radio program director, brought Kempner an idea for a half-hour game show built around home video games, and they arrived with a commitment from Magnavox. Kempner spent a weekend playing video games, then took the concept to Phil Boyer, vice president of programming at ABC. Boyer liked the idea and disliked the format. Rather than another half-hour game show in an already crowded market, he suggested something stations could drop into their own schedules whenever they liked, a short call-in insert in the spirit of Dialing for Dollars.

Kempner took that advice back to the clients, who ignored it. A pilot was shot anyway, and around it Kempner realized he had been cut out of the Magnavox arrangement entirely. The tell, in his account, was small and unmistakable: on the morning of the shoot, the Magnavox people did not think to ask whether he wanted a ride to the studio.

What survived the collapse was Boyer's format note, and it is the reason TV Powww exists as an insert rather than a program.

The letter to Fairchild

Kempner wrote to Wilfred Corrigan, president of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, on September 6, describing a show in which viewers would play games on air, and asking whether Fairchild could supply a game system and develop voice-recognition hardware to let players control it down a telephone line. He sent a similar letter to Atari.

Fairchild called back. In a meeting with the marketing director of its video game division, the engineers said they could build the voice-activation box. Asked whether they could also get the game picture off the front of a picture tube and onto a broadcast signal, they again said yes, and estimated six months. Fairchild contracted to supply custom Channel F consoles at $2,500 each, along with custom cartridges roughly three times the size of the retail ones.

The second promise turned out to be much harder than the first, and the man who found out was the engineer assigned to it.

The engineer's own account

Richard Olney, the Fairchild engineer who did the early development work, wrote up what he remembered in May 2020 and provided it, with supporting documents, to historian Kevin Bunch. It is a notably careful piece of testimony. Olney does not reconstruct a narrative or claim more than he has.

He was explicit about the limits of what he could offer: "I don't recall how the concept came to the game group nor do I recall exact dates." He then listed three specific recollections and nothing beyond them.

The first was the hardware itself. Describing the arrangement that let a voice coming down a phone line trigger a game, he wrote: "As part of that I recall putting the telephone handset into an acoustic coupler box."

The second is why the show has the name it has. Olney wrote: "We switched the concept from 'TV Bang' to 'TV POW' after I started work on the interface to the phone line. (Or maybe the original concept was 'TV Fire' or 'TV Shoot'?) The sound of 'Bang' was not easily detectable whereas 'POW' starts with a sharp puff of sound for the 'P' that was detectable."

The third memory is the failure. "there was a trip to a Denver tv station to try out the system. I have vague recollections that the telephone interface worked ok. But overall the trip was a failure because we couldn't provide a decent game picture into the video network of the station." The reason was a fundamental incompatibility with how television stations worked: "The problem is that Channel F output could not be synchronized with the master video signal at the station. At that time TV stations didn't have frame synchronizing equipment."

Olney left Fairchild in April 1978, six months before the format's on-air debut, and he is explicit that the breakthrough was not his: "The information that you supplied shows that someone continued working on the concept and solved the problem of getting a broadcast quality signal out of the Channel F game." He closed the account plainly: "That is the extent of my direct knowledge of the TV POW concept."

The patent, and the problem nobody thinks about

Olney's work is not only a memory. It is on file as United States patent 4,236,048, "Electronic device for subtracting signals and associated system employing such device", filed in January 1979 and granted in November 1980, with Olney as the inventor.

The patent's summary describes the show in the flat language of engineering: "An electronic game in a television studio is coupled to a telephone located in the general vicinity of the electronic game."

It also documents a problem that never occurs to anyone watching. The host is talking to the caller, which means the host's voice is going into the same telephone circuit that is listening for the trigger word. Without a fix, the emcee firing off a sentence would fire the gun. The patent's stated purpose is to cancel that path: "To prevent the emcee, who is the local speaker/listener, from actuating the electronic game through the sidetone signal, the effect of the sidetone signal is cancelled so that the electronic game responds solely to the voice of the remote speaker/listener from the home audience."

The reason TV Powww needed a patent at all is that a machine had to tell the difference between two voices on one phone line, and only obey one of them.

The demonstration that was not connected to anything

The selling of the format, in Kempner's account by way of Smith, ran ahead of the technology by a wide margin.

With the real system still unfinished, Kempner set up a demonstration for a room of executives at a Las Vegas hotel: two 21-inch televisions running a shooting gallery cartridge, and beside each one a telephone that was connected to nothing at all. He called two executives to the stage, explained the concept, and told them to yell "POW!" into the dead handsets whenever they wanted to shoot. Each time they did, Kempner pressed the button on his own controller.

In his telling the room did not notice and did not care. Al Flanagan of Combined Communications came onto the stage and demanded an option on all seven of the stations he owned.

The technology stayed behind schedule right up to the edge. Ahead of the 1978 NATPE convention, Kempner and the Fairchild engineers set up at KABC in Los Angeles on the Monday and failed to get the system working, failed again Tuesday, failed again Wednesday, and only got it running on the Thursday. When it finally aired, the station's phone lines were swamped. The rollout date still had to move from September 1 to October 1.

Did it actually work, or did somebody just press the button

This is the live dispute about TV Powww, and the honest answer is that both things happened.

The technology was real. The patent exists, Olney built and tested the coupling hardware, and he recalls the telephone interface working acceptably even on the trip where everything else went wrong.

But a 2008 retrospective by WPIX in New York, the station that ran the format as TV PIXXX with viewers shouting "Pix" instead of "Pow", reported that stations lacking the voice-activation consoles simply had an employee in the control room hit the fire button when the caller spoke. Accounts of how widely that happened vary, and the archival record says so directly rather than choosing a side.

The most interesting witness is Olney himself. Sent links to surviving clips in 2020, he watched them as an engineer and did not defend his own system. Of one clip he noted that shots were fired without any "POW" at all, "so this may be a case of someone off-stage acting as a proxy for the home viewer." Of another, where a console other than the Channel F appears, he wrote: "Maybe the telephone interface was not hooked up to the 'other game' and they just faked the response to the home viewer."

The man who patented the circuit is on the record suspecting that some broadcasts bypassed it.

How far it actually spread

TV Powww ran as an insert rather than a show, which is why it turns up inside so many different programs. Stations dropped it into commercial breaks, local news, morning programs, and most often children's programming: WGN in Chicago carried it inside Bozo's Circus, and the format debuted in 1978 on KABC in Los Angeles as part of A.M. Los Angeles. Some markets, including KTTV in Los Angeles, ran it as a standalone program instead.

Demand occasionally outran the infrastructure. In the account Smith drew from Kempner's book, KSL in Salt Lake City was pushed by the phone company into calling viewers out rather than taking calls in, after interest in the segment knocked out telephone service across seven states.

The reach figures do not agree, and the disagreement is worth stating rather than splitting. The archival record, citing a 2002 New York Times retrospective, puts the format on 79 local stations by the start of the 1980s plus several foreign broadcasters. Kempner's own account, as relayed by Smith, puts the peak at over 100 stations with later syndication into Europe, Asia and Australia. Promoters count generously and press accounts count conservatively, and no reconciled figure exists.

After Fairchild left the home video game business, Intellivision games were used instead. Most American stations had dropped the format by the mid-1980s, though stations in Australia and Italy were still running it as late as 1990. Kempner later approached Nintendo and then Sega about a revival, and was turned down by both.

How the telling has grown over the decades

The drift here is not the usual kind, where a story grows in the retelling. It is a split by vantage point. Kempner's account is a sales story in which the obstacles are partners who lose their nerve, Magnavox and later Mattel and Fairchild. Olney's account is an engineering story in which the obstacle is a television station's sync generator, and in which he declines to claim the fix that made the format viable. Both describe the same eighteen months. Neither contradicts the other on a single verifiable fact, and they barely overlap.

The honest bottom line

TV Powww was a video game you played by yelling a single syllable into a telephone while watching a screen that was several seconds behind you, and the lag alone made it close to unplayable. Some stations did not even use the technology and had a staffer push the button. The prizes were small, the games were primitive, and the whole format was a syndication product built to fill ninety seconds inside somebody else's show. What it also was, in 1978, is an actual working attempt at interactive television, patented, engineered around a real acoustic constraint, and beamed into homes a quarter century before anyone used the phrase second screen. It failed for the most ordinary reason in broadcasting: the people who owned the hardware lost interest.

Sources

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the USA Cartoon Express lineup in 1985 and the full story of Remote Control.

Frequently asked

What was TV Powww?

A syndicated television segment launched in 1978 in which a home viewer telephoned a local station, watched a video game playing on their own television, and shouted "Pow!" into the phone to fire the weapon on screen. Stations inserted it into their own programming, most often children's shows.

How did TV Powww actually work?

The caller's voice traveled down the phone line to a receiver at the studio, where hardware detected the sound and triggered the game. Fairchild engineer Richard Olney patented the circuit, which also had to cancel the host's own voice so the emcee could talk to the caller without firing the game himself.

Why was it called Pow and not Bang?

Acoustics. Olney has written that the concept switched from TV Bang to TV Pow once work started on the phone interface, because "bang" was not easily detectable while "pow" opens with a sharp puff of sound on the P that the hardware could pick up.

Was TV Powww real or did someone press the button?

Both, depending on the station. The voice-activation technology existed and was patented. A 2008 WPIX retrospective reported that stations without the special consoles had an employee hit the fire button manually, and Olney himself, watching surviving clips in 2020, suspected some airings were faked.

Who created TV Powww?

Florida syndicator Marvin Kempner, of M.A. Kempner Inc., who wrote to Fairchild in September asking for a game system and voice-recognition hardware after an earlier deal built around Magnavox collapsed.

How long did TV Powww last?

Most American stations had dropped it by the mid-1980s, though it continued in Australia and Italy as late as 1990. Kempner later tried and failed to interest Nintendo and Sega in reviving it.