Ralph Baer Changed Your Life

Back in 2011, Motherboard chatted with Baer about his impact on the industry. In light of his death and the fresh conversation around his accomplishments, we are re-airing that documentary.

Ralph Baer has passed away at the age of 92, Ga​masutra reports. Even if this is the first time you're reading his name, there's little doubt he has affected your life. Baer developed the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, as well as the Simon—that four-color electronic memory game that has been frustrating kids since the '70s—and was still acquiring patents well past retirement age. He received the National Medal of Technology in 2006.

Baer was born in southwestern Germany in 1922, and in 1938, his family fled to the United States through Holland. By 1943 he was back in Europe serving with the US Army, where he became an expert on small arms—which fittingly foreshadows how he would later invent and patent a precursor to Nintendo's Duck Hunt gun. After the war, Baer got one of the first TV engineering degrees from Chicago's American Television Institute of Technology, and began a career as an inventor. He started with surgical cutting machines, moved on to analog military radar, and eventually made a home video game console in the form of the Magnavox Odyssey.

Baer first conceived of a "TV gaming display" in 1951. His employer at the time wasn't interested, so the idea was put to rest for 15 years. In 1966, he again laid out his vision for what a TV gaming displa​y could do in 12 pages: action games, educational games, artistic games, all envisioned at a time when TV was a very one-way medium. Within the year he and his colleagues at the defense contractor Sanders Associates had built a prototype.You can check out the TV gaming display​ patent, filed in 1969, on Google.

As someone whose work is in​ the Smithsonian, it's hard to say that Baer has been ignored or underrated, but it might be safe to say that his influence sometimes overshadows his work.

For instance, Pong is based on Baer's Table Tennis, which is available to play in your browser​. Pong is probably a better game—Table Tennis doesn't keep score for players, the ball doesn't bounce off the sides of the screen—but it owes such a debt that a cash-strapped Atari ended up paying Magnavox to license the game. Baer also invented a teddy bear that interacted with a VCR that came out a few years before Teddy Ruxpin, the very unsettling but more popular animatronic bear.

If you don't have a Simon handy, you should probably find a friend to play Table Tennis against, in memoriam. Baer's goal was to eventually create "a device whereby an individual may pit his alertness, skill, manual dexterity and visual acuity against automatically controlled video displays," but Table Tennis was exclusively a two-player game. To change the game to hockey or other variations, you had to put overlays onto your television screen, where they were held in place by static electricity.

To give you an idea of the technology that Baer was working with, ove​r at the Video Game Console Library, the Odyssey is described as having "no real specs. It contained no processor or memory. The box is made up of transistors, resistors and capacitors. Odyssey used cards that contained pin outs to change game settings."

In the video above you can see Baer demonstrating Table Tennis in 1969. Judging from his gibes at fellow-engineer Bill Harrison—"You want to score, Bill?"—there's a good chance that Baer also may have been the first trash-talker in the history of video games.

Now, of course, both trash talk and video games are ubiquitous and vibrant art forms, thanks in part to the efforts of Ralph Baer. In the words of Steve Wozniak, who could be described as a Baer of personal computing, blurbed for Baer's book, "I can never thank Ralph enough for what he gave to me and everyone else."