March 8, 1922 – Birth of Ralph Baer, “Father of Video Games”

Ralph Baer, born on this day in history, was an engineer who conceived the idea of playing games on a television screen around 1966.

Baer was born in Germany, but his family, experiencing discrimination for being Jewish, moved to New York City in 1938, just prior to the ban on Jewish emigration. (The Nazis did not want Jews to leave; they preferred to confiscate their assets and then kill them.) Baer later became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Ralph Baer

At first, Baer worked in a factory for a weekly wage of twelve dollars. After seeing an advertisement at a bus station for education in the budding electronics field, he quit his job to study at the National Radio Institute. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II and assigned to military intelligence at the United States Army headquarters in London. Having his secondary education funded by the G.I. Bill, Baer was able to graduate in 1949 with a Bachelor of Science degree in in television engineering – unique at the time – from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Baer worked his way up in several engineering companies, eventually joining defense contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1956, where he stayed until retiring in 1987. Baer’s primary responsibility at Sanders was overseeing about 500 engineers in the development of electronic systems being used for military applications. Out of this work came the concept in 1966 of a home video game console.

Ralph Baer shows the prototype of the first games console. Credit: Jens Wolf /DPA /Landov

According to his 2014 New York Times obituary, an intrigued boss gave him $2,000 for research and $500 for materials and assigned two men to work with him. Baer developed a number of games that became part of his ‘Brown Box’ – a multi-game console. The games included ping-pong, handball, soccer, volleyball, target shooting, checkers, and golf.

In March 1971, Mr. Baer and his employer filed for the first video game patent, which was granted in April 1973 as Patent No. 3,728,480. It made an extraordinarily large claim to a legal monopoly for any product that included a domestic television with circuits capable of producing and controlling dots on a screen.

Sanders Associates licensed its system to Magnavox, which began selling it as Odyssey in the summer of 1972 as the first home video game console.

NPR explained:

The primitive system was all hardware and used “program cards” for games. Plastic overlays for the television screen provided color. Priced at $100 (though Baer had recommended $19.95), the Odyssey sold more than 100,000 units its first year and 300,000 by 1975.”

The Magnavox Odyssey — derived from Ralph Baer’s “Brown Box” invention — was sold as the first home video game system in 1972. Credit: Rich Strauss/National Museum of American History

In his 2014 obituary, the New York Times recounted:

Several months after Odyssey hit the market, Atari came out with the first arcade video game, Pong. Though Pong became better known than Odyssey and was in some ways more agile, Sanders and Magnavox immediately saw it as an infringement on their patent.

They sued Atari in 1974 for usurping their rights. Atari settled with them by paying $1.5 million to become Odyssey’s second licensee. Over the next 20 years, Magnavox went on to sue dozens more companies, winning more than $100 million. Mr. Baer often testified.”

The Times also noted that “Mr. Baer’s contraption represented the beginnings of a change in man’s relationship with machines.”

In 2006, Baer was a recipient of the National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush. Baer was also admitted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010. He donated much of his collection of early video game prototypes to museums, including the Smithsonian Institution. Baer died at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6, 2014 at age 92.

The value of the video game market in the U.S. in 2020 was calculated to be 60.4 billion U.S. dollars. Statista.com also shows the incredible growth of the worldwide market.

Via Statista.com