Thank you to our friend Mark Baer for supplying this retrospective on his Father who has effected millions of our lives.

Ralph H. Baer – The Father of Videogames – Born on this date March 8, 1922

March 8, 2022, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth one of the 20th Century’s most prolific and consequential inventors. It was on this day, one hundred years ago that Ralph Henry Baer was born in Pirmasens, Germany. Baer would go on to create seminal electronic devices, toys, and gadgets. None, however, would be bigger than his seminal conceptualization and work and of what was to become the modern video game industry.

The modern video game industry is huge. It is estimated that in 2020 alone, the video game industry generated in excess of $180 billion in commercial activity which is far larger than the television and movie industries...combined! And it can all be directly traced back to years of work by a team of engineers from Sanders Associates in New Hampshire, now BAE Systems, led by inventor Ralph H Baer.

By 1966, tens of millions of Americans – and many millions more around the world - had television sets into their homes and Ralph Baer, who had fled fascist Germany and settled in the United States, was keenly aware of this fact after his return from the US Army during WWII Baer when he earned a degree via the GI Bill in television engineering. Ralph was amongst the first to do this and that technical training, along with his natural inquisitiveness and creativity, caused him to see the growing use of television technology first-hand.

One day – 1 September 1966 to be exact - while sitting at a bus stop, he brainstormed ways to make television sets even more useful and entertaining. See: https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/documents/disclosure-document/ He jotted down all the different types of activities that he imagined could be played on a television unit, including table tennis, auto racing and chess along with other activities such as the interactive use of the medium for instruction and the creation of art.
And while that was hardly the only thing Ralph Baer had done to that point or would do throughout his seventy plus years of inventing, it was tremendously consequential. Ralph had an almost childlike fascination with trying to create new things. And so it was that he “thought about using the television as more than just a box to stare at but as something that could be used as an interactive medium,” as he once described it.

After starting initial independent work on his idea, Baer was given the green light to assemble a team of engineers to bring his vision for the television into focus. For more than three years, Baer and his team, working out of their lab on Canal Street in Nashua, N.H., developed technology that would simply be revolutionary.

The result of that work was that in 1969 Baer’s team officially unveiled the very first multiplayer television video game system which they nicknamed “The Brown Box.” See:

The Brown Box – which referred to the woodgrain, self-adhesive vinyl that covered the console – introduced and featured separate controls and a multigame program system, the basic features most video game units still have today.
On that first system, one could play table tennis, checkers, four different sports games, target shooting with a light gun, and a golf putting game. The original unit is now part of Lemelson Center’s collection at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum in Washington, DC.

In 1971, (relating back to US Application Data of 1/15/68) Baer filed for the first video game patent which concerned itself with the workings of the Brown Box. Thereafter the Brown Box was licensed to the Magnavox Corporation and sold as the “Odyssey” in 1972 – the world’s first video game system. Other systems followed thereafter, and the modern video game industry was created. Since those early years Baer’s groundbreaking work has found its way into various platforms including personal computers, handheld devices, and smart phones.

No one could have fully imagined it then, but Baer’s work laid the groundwork for many aspects of today’s related multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry and related concepts such as the presence video game style games in myriad of platforms. As a result, Ralph Baer has been called “The Father of Video Games” for his part in spearheading the system from which the modern videogame industry sprang. Baer also has been recognized as “An Icon of American Innovation” and was inducted into the USPTO’s Inventor Hall of Fame and received the National Medal of Technology from the President of the United States. Ralph also received the Game Developers Choice Award for his pioneering work in 2008. His artifacts, papers and even his workshops are on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C as well as the Strong Museum in Rochester, NY and the Millyard Museum in Manchester, NH amongst other forums with his work including the Dynamikum science museum in Ralph’s birth city of Permasens, Germany and the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas. Ralph has also received accolades from around the world, from Japan to Australia and Italy, amongst others.

Recently, the City of Manchester New Hampshire unveiled a statue and plaza in the city’s Silicon Millyard, an area now regarded as a substantial tech hub in New England, honoring Ralph Baer, the local technology landscape, and his vision. It is considered a fitting tribute to the man whose efforts, along with his team of engineers and companies that supported him, helped change the world.