Most people, if they recognise Ralph Baer at all, will recognise him from the above photo.
Baer is credited with creating the first ever video game home console, which was dubbed the “Odyssey” and released by Magnavox in 1972. All twelve of the games programmed on the system—Table Tennis, Tennis, Hockey, Cat and Mouse, Football, Ski, Skates, Roulette, Haunted House, Analogic, Submarine, and Simon Says—required a second player to play because the console had no CPU with which to perform logic.
This also meant that the console had very few rules governing its gameplay, so players were responsible for keeping score, and enforcing the rules of any particular game. Due to the system’s limitations, only a few objects could be displayed so, in order to overcome this limitation and improve the visualization of the games that were being simulated, plastic overlays were included with the console which could be placed on TV screens in order to add more visual detail.
You can watch the television ad for the system below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2EIsnr_cv4
Baer died at the age of 92 on December 6th, in his New Hampshire home, according to a Facebook post by Leonard Herman, video game historian and friend of Baer.
Ralph Baer was born on March 8, 1922, in Germany, and fled to the United States of America when the Nazis came to power. As a teenager, he worked at a leather factory, and then as a radio and TV repairman. In 1943, during World War II, he was drafted and assigned to military intelligence in the US Army Headquarters in London. After returning to America, he earned a BSc in Television Engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in 1949, and worked various jobs in the electronics industry thereafter.
Besides the Odyssey, he also created a light gun, a video game controller in the shape of a gun, for the Odyssey console; it just so happened to be the first ever peripheral created for a gaming console.
Although he took pride in his contribution to what he considered a fledgling art form, he also disliked what he helped to created: he lamented the violence that has come to define a lot of popular titles of the medium today. “I think it’s a disgrace,” he said of such games. “What I created got abominated. You can see the same thing in music, literature, art—any form of art.”
For a more in-depth look at Ralph Baer’s contributions to and life in the video games industry, we recommend this Salt Lake Tribune article.
[Author’s note: the light gun referenced in the article is the first such device created for a console, not the first of its kind ever created; the paragraph was amended for clarity.]
