Ralph Baer obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/09/ralph-baer

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In the days when most people were content to relax in front of the family television set, Ralph Baer, who has died aged 92, had a revolutionary idea. As an electronics engineer, he realised that people could control what was on the screen, even if it was little more than a white dot. The direct result was the first home video games console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which sold more than 330,000 units between 1972 and 1974. It also started an industry in which consoles sell tens of millions of units and blockbuster games can earn more than Hollywood movies.

Baer had his eureka moment in 1966 while waiting outside a bus station in Manhattan, New York, and wrote a four-page outline about the “game box” and some possible games. At the time, however, he was chief engineer running eight equipment design departments for Sanders Associates, a large military contractor that was later merged into Lockheed Martin Aerospace and is now part of BAE. His bosses were not interested at first but eventually Sanders gave Baer a $2,500 budget and two co-workers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, to develop the idea as a side-project.

The team built six prototypes before coming up with what Baer called the Brown Box, because it was covered in a stick-on wood-effect plastic veneer. “Then we went on a two-year trek to find somebody who would take a licence and actually produce something,” Baer told David Friedman in a video interview for PBS. “That turned out to be Magnavox.”

Despite its initial success, Magnavox, an American TV manufacturer, failed to build a video games business. However, thanks to Baer’s patents and frequent court appearances, Magnavox and Sanders made a lot of money out of suing the companies that did, including Atari and Nintendo. Baer did not invent video gaming: that honour probably goes to William Higinbotham of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, who created Tennis for Two in 1958. But Baer’s side-project did invent the home console video game format, including handheld controllers and games on small plug-in circuit boards (aka cartridges). A small arms aficionado, Baer also invented the first light gun accessory.

In 1975, while still working for Sanders, Baer started Ralph H Baer Consultants to channel his ideas for toys and games to more appropriate manufacturers. His successes included Milton-Bradley’s Simon electronic memory game, named after Simon Says, which still sells today. After retiring from Sanders in 1987, this became his full-time interest. His later inventions included talking teddy bears, the Bike-Max talking speedometer for Milton-Bradley and Bacova’s “recordable talking doormat”, the Chat-Mat.

“By and large, I’m in the same boat as other inventors,” he told PBS. “If we’re lucky, of the 10 or 15 items we do a year, maybe one or two of them wind up with a licensing agreement.”

Baer was born in Pirmasens, near Germany’s border with France, to Lotte (nee Kirschbaum) and Leo, who worked in a shoe factory. The Jewish family fled the Nazis in 1938, and settled in the Bronx, New York. Baer was working in a factory when he saw a magazine advert for a correspondence course that said he could make “big money” servicing radios and TV sets. He did it.

By 1940 he had earned a diploma from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician, and by 1943 he was running three service stores in New York City. The second world war intervened, and Baer spent three years in the US army, including two years in Europe. He brought back 18 tons of “foreign small arms” that went into official US army exhibitions. The GI Bill then enabled him to become one of the first to get a degree in television engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. This launched him into a career designing all kinds of things from epilators to airborne radar equipment. In the 1950s, his designs included a black-and-white TV set, ham radio equipment, and hi-fi products including electrostatic loudspeakers.

Baer continued working for the rest of his life. As he put it: “So what am I going to do? I need a challenge. And I still get a big charge out of making something work.”Mindful of his legacy, he published a book about his work: Videogames: In The Beginning (2005). He also created working replicas of eight console prototypes for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and donated the originals to the Smithsonian Institution. Baer married Dena Whinston in 1952; she died in 2006. He is survived by two sons, James and Mark; a daughter, Nancy; and four grandchildren.

• Ralph (Rudolf Heinrich) Baer, computer engineer, born 8 March 1922; died 6 December 2014