Ralph Baer, widely known as the father of home video game consoles, passed away on Saturday at the age of 92.
Ralph Baer, whose death was confirmed by the New York Times, began researching the possibility of playing video games on a home television screen while working as a defense systems engineer in 1966. The result of his work was the “Brown Box,” a prototype for the “Magnavox Odyssey,” the first home game console. His invention helped transform gaming, which had previously been confined to large, expensive computers, into a global market that now generates billions of dollars for video game companies each year.
Magnavox released the Odyssey in 1972. This console, the predecessor to the Xbox and PlayStation , was primitive by today's standards. The unit produced no sound, was battery-powered, and used light overlays to simulate color graphics on television screens. Priced at $100, the Odyssey sold nearly 100,000 units in 1972, five years before the more famous video game console, the Atari 2600, took the world by storm.
While Baer admitted in a 2011 interview that at the time he couldn't have predicted the revolution his invention would bring, he was very modest about it.
Born in Germany on March 8, 1922, Baer immigrated with his Jewish family to the United States on the eve of World War II. He settled in New York City with his family in 1938, and soon found work in a leather goods factory. He happened to see an advertisement for a mail-order apprenticeship for electronics, so he quit his factory job and became a radio technician in 1940.
After serving in London during World War II, Ralph Baer used the GI Bill to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in television engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in 1949. From then on, he worked in defense systems at Sander until he retired in 1987.
He holds 50 US patents and about 100 worldwide. He has also designed some of the first video games such as Ping-Pong, Handball and Soccer, as well as the memory game Simon.
In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology by then-President George W. Bush for his innovation and pioneering work in video games. In 2010, Ralph Baer was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
