Ralph H. Baer

Developer of early home video game technology

• Born: March 8, 1922
• Birthplace: Pirmasens, Germany
• Died: December 6, 2014
• Place of death: Manchester, New Hamphire

Primary Company/Organization: Sanders Associates

Introduction

Ralph H. Baer fled Nazi Germany to become an engineer in the United States after serving in military intelligence during World War II. Among the first to earn a degree in television engineering, he was interested in advancing the possibilities of television technology beyond passive viewing. While working for a defense contractor, he led a small team designing the first home video game console, a device intended to make home television sets interactive: the Magnavox Odyssey, soon followed by the Odyssey2, which preceded the Atari and other well-known brands, as well as including a keyboard for input at a time when personal computers were still largely unheard of. His later work included the popular handheld game Simon.

Early Life

Ralph Henry Baer was born on March 8, 1922, in Rodalben in the Palatinate region of Germany, the son of a factory worker. As a young Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, he was expelled from his school in 1933 and forced to enroll in an all-Jewish school. His family left Germany for the United States in 1938 as the anti-Jewish pogroms began in Europe. Newly immigrated to New York City at the age of sixteen, he helped support his family by working in a factory, took correspondence courses from the National Radio Institute to become certified as a radio service technician, and worked servicing home and car radios, FM radios, and early television sets. Drafted in 1943, he served in France in US Army intelligence.

After the war, Baer attended Chicago's American Television Institute of Technology and graduated with a bachelor of science degree in television engineering in 1949, the first in the world to receive a television engineering degree. Unable to find a job related to the new technology fresh out of college, he took a variety of engineering jobs before joining the newly formed defense contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1956.

Life's Work

Baer was hired as the staff engineer to the manager of the Equipment Design Division at Sanders Associates and initially worked building surveillance systems for use in West Berlin, as well as aircraft radar systems. In 1958, he was made division manager and chief engineer for equipment design, with the authority to direct his own projects. Expenditures eventually had to be justified, but the costs of the usual work the company did—custom-designed and custom-manufactured circuitry for the military and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, high-end medical equipment, and other specialized technology—were high enough, with direct labor costs close to $10 million per year, that smaller projects could be pursued during free time without impacting the company's overhead. Some of these projects were dead-ends; some led to improved products; some led to innovations that might or might not have commercial applications. Letting employees pursue projects they are passionate about is a technique that many companies have used since—either by looking the other way, as Sanders did, or by actively encouraging such pursuits, as Google does—in order to keep employees engaged with their work and developing potentially profitable ideas that might not be discovered otherwise.

What Baer wanted to do was keep the television revolution moving rather than settle for a device that could be used only by passively watching it. He wrote a four-page paper in 1966, accompanied by a diagram for a two-player game that used the television set as its display. Much of the work was conducted in a small workshop in Sanders's Canal Street building, a 10- by 20-foot former library. Baer and his team envisioned a set-top box—the first video game console—which would do the processing and act as an interface for input devices, while the customer's television would function as the display device. Video games were not the only intended use, although the first stand-alone arcade games (supplementing mechanical midway games and pinball games) were being released at the time, including the light gun game Duck Hunt and the first-person racer Grand Prix, both of which were electromechanical rather than fully electronic. Unlike the console Baer developed—first called the Brown Box and later the Odyssey—these games contained their own displays. However, a home console that could “piggyback” on the customer's existing television set could be sold at a lower price point. Furthermore, unlike arcade games or the home version of Pong, which came later, the Odyssey could play multiple games, and the customer could purchase more games and peripheral devices later, at a substantially lower cost than the console.

A working prototype was finished in 1968. The work was done a little at a time, in spare moments. When others at Sanders heard about the project, Baer's team began making short black-and-white movies to demonstrate their work and convince executives to let them keep developing the Brown Box. These videos, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, demonstrate various applications for the Brown Box: playing video Ping-Pong on the television screen; making impulse purchases of products seen in television commercials (with the advantage, Baer points out, that the customer does not risk forgetting the product name, make, model, or other details) with a Brown Box equipped with a modem developed at Sanders; and online education. (Having taken radio technician correspondence courses, Baer was surely in a position to understand the advances to classroom-free education that could be made through the use of electronics and telecommunications.) As some of these applications demonstrate, Baer was not just inventing the first home video game system; he actually had in mind innovations that would not be implemented by the industry for years to come. He demonstrated online gaming decades before today's massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), for instance, with proof-of-concept demonstrations of video games played over cable with TelePrompTer Corporation in 1968 and Warner Cable in 1973.

The Brown Box was demonstrated to numerous American television set manufacturers, including RCA, GE, Zenith, Sylvania, Sears, and Magnavox. RCA originally licensed the console but soon canceled it. A year later, in 1971, Magnavox agreed to produce the console that would be known as the Magnavox Odyssey. It premiered exactly twelve months later, in March 1972. Games for the Odyssey included basic sports games—baseball, handball, hockey, table tennis, soccer—and the game Shooting Gallery, which used a light gun that detected light from the television set to identify whether a target had been hit. Games were produced on removable printed circuit boards that were inserted into a slot.

The Odyssey generated a lot of what would now be called buzz but fared poorly financially. Too many customers assumed it would work only on Magnavox televisions. Others may not have realized that they would not need to purchase a new console for each individual game. However, in particular, the Odyssey was simply ahead of its time; the demand for video games did not yet exist, nor did the brand-name “killer app” games like Donkey Kong or Pac-Man, which would drive much of the demand for later generations of consoles.

Two months after the Magnavox Odyssey's premiere, Nolan Bushnell attended a demonstration of the console and played the Ping-Pong game designed for it. Not long after, he hired Allan Alcorn to design a coin-operated Ping-Pong video game for arcades, which became Pong, the first major arcade game. A home version of Pong followed, and Bushnell later became president of Atari, the first successful home video game company.

Further models of the Odyssey were introduced. In 1978, the Odyssey² was a significant leap forward; while Odyssey consoles from 1975 to 1977 had added sound, four-player games, and improvements to game play, the Odyssey² came with a small keyboard much like that of a laptop computer. The Odyssey² was Sanders's entry in what is now called the second generation of video games, contemporary with the Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, and Vectrex but generally superior in design. A speech synthesis unit sold separately greatly enhanced the sound available to games, helping to popularize Quest for the Rings, an early role-playing game. The Odyssey² game line included versions (or “ports”) of Frogger, Popeye, and Q*Bert, the Pac-Man-like K. C. Munchkin, and Pick Axe Pete, a popular action game.

Over a ten-year period, Baer testified in numerous patent infringement cases in which Magnavox or Sanders was the plaintiff, defending his video game innovations from the many copycats of the era. Nearly $100 million was awarded to the two companies. Atari settled an infringement case over Pong out of court.

Baer continued working on video games at Sanders. In 1975, he developed interactive games using videocassette recorders (VCRs), which like console video games were an opportunistic technology taking advantage of the fact that consumers already owned the television. Data would be nested in the video signal in order to allow for interaction between the player, a microprocessor, and video footage. In the late 1970s, he led a Sanders group contracted to video game producer Coleco, to develop video games for that firm—including Telstar, Arcade, and Combat—which led to Coleco's production in 1978 of KidVid, a video game system for preschoolers, and a video disc interface for Coleco's ColecoVision console and Adam home computer.

In the late 1970s, Baer began developing electronic toys, the component parts having become cheap enough to make this a quickly accelerating field. In 1978, he invented the Simon handheld electronic game, which became an iconic game known for its four-section circular design of green, red, blue, and yellow buttons. Later games and toys included interactive Teddy bears building on the VCR game technology Baer had pioneered, interactive books for Golden Books, and in 2000 the line of Talking Tools for Hasbro. Although he retired from Sanders in 1987, Baer continued to work as a consultant for the company until 1990. From 1990 to his retirement in 2001, he devoted himself full time to R. H. Baer Consultants, which he had originally founded for afterhours work in 1975.

After his retirement, Baer published Videogames: In the Beginning, his memoir of the early video game era. In a nod to the amount of time he spent testifying in patent infringement cases, the book has a “Plaintiff's Exhibit” sticker on the cover. He also points out in the book that after Lockheed purchased Sanders, inventors were guaranteed a share of the profits generated by their inventions—a rule that went into effect much too late to help Baer.

Personal Life

Baer married Dena Whinston in 1952 while living in New York, and they remained married until her death in 2006. Their son James Whinston Baer was born in New York; Mark Whinston Baer and Nancy Doris Baer were born in Manchester, New Hampshire, after Baer relocated to work for Sanders. In 2004, President George W. Bush awarded Baer the National Medal of Technology “for inventing the first video game console.” Baer passed away at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire, on December 6, 2014, at the age of ninety-two.

Bibliography

Baer, Ralph H. Videogames: In the Beginning. Springfield: Rolenta, 2005. Print.

Dillon, Roberto. The Golden Age of Video Games: The Birth of a Multibillion Dollar Industry. New York: CRC, 2011. Print.

Donovan, Tristan. Replay: The History of Video Games. East Lewes: Yellow Ant, 2010. Print.

Martin, Douglas. "Ralph H. Baer, Inventor of First System for Home Video Games, Is Dead at 92." New York Times. New York Times, 7 Dec. 2014. Web. 28 Sept. 2015.