Ralph Baer, inventor of the first home video game console, dies at 92

[Borealis]

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/business/ralph-h-baer-dies-inventor-of-odyssey-first-system-for-home-video-games.html?_r=1

Ralph H. Baer, who turned television sets into electronic fantasy lands by inventing and patenting the first home video game system, died on Saturday at his home in Manchester, N.H.
He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family.

Flash back to the sultry late summer of 1966: Mr. Baer is sitting on a step outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan waiting for a colleague. By profession, he is an engineer
overseeing 500 employees at a military contractor. Today, a vision has gripped him, and he begins scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad with a No. 2 pencil.

The result was a detailed four-page outline for a “game box” that would allow people to play board, action, sports and other games on almost any American television set. An intrigued
boss gave him $2,000 for research and $500 for materials and assigned two men to work with him. For all three, as they plowed through prototype after prototype in a secret
workshop, the project became an obsession.

Mr. Baer’s contraption represented the beginnings of a change in man’s relationship with machines. Harold Goldberg, in his book “All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of
Videogames Conquered Pop Culture” (2011), said Mr. Baer made television “an extension of you, the player.”

Mr. Baer had more than 150 United States and foreign patents, and his contributions ranged from talking doormats and greeting cards to submarine tracking systems. In 2006,
President George W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Technology. In 2010, he was admitted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

“If it weren’t for video game enthusiasts and the absolute commercial need to keep them happy with ever-better graphics requiring ever-higher processor speeds, complex computer
graphics would still be found only in the high-priced domains of the business and science world,” he said.

Mr. Baer is survived by two sons, James and Mark; a daughter, Nancy Baer; and four grandchildren. His wife of 53 years, the former Dena Whinston, died in 2006.
Mr. Baer donated his collection of early game hardware to several museums, including the Smithsonian Institution.

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