Profiles of Awesome - Ralph Baer

Welcome to the first installment of my new feature; "Profiles of Awesome." The purpose of this new feature is to talk about those who had an impact on history, especially among the items that this blog covers, so people can better know those that helped shape the little things in life that you don't really think about.

Honestly, I couldn't point at a single other person that I'd rather have start us off than Ralph Baer, commonly known as "The Father of Video Games." His life has been interesting and, since a fairly young age, it is known that he wanted to create ways to expand the user experience in television and offer a more engaging experience over all.

Born March 8th, 1922 in Germany; Baer had Jewish ancestry and, because of that, was expelled from his school at the age of 11. During this time, his father worked at a shoe factory in Pirmasens, a city basically on the border with France. His family fled with him to Holland in 1938 only a couple months before the infamous Kristallnacht.

From Holland, he and his family made their way to the United States where he studied at the National Radio Institute and graduated in 1940. Between 1940 and 1943, he helped run three radio service shops in the greater New York City area.

In 1943, he was drafted to fight in World War II. Spending three years in the service, he spent most of his time over in Europe as a part of Military Intelligence. Though he was stationed in France, he was directly battling the Nazis who were a major reason why he and his family had to flee their homeland of Germany. By 1945, the war in Europe was over and in 1946 he was honorably discharged from the US Army.

After his time in the service, Baer continued his education at the American Television Institute of Technology, located in Chicago, and graduated in 1949 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering.

Just after graduating, he was hired on to be the Chief Engineer (and at the time, only engineer) for Wappler, Inc. where he worked for about a year before moving to Loral Electronics. There he helped design analog computers for military use during the Cold War and happened to develop a completed black and white television receiver. It was at Loral Electronics that he first came up with the idea of building a television that actually had an interactive gaming device built into it to provide the consumer a much more entertaining experience by directly engaging their television. The idea was shot down by higher ups and he simply placed it on the back burner.

In 1955, Loral moved to Manchester, New Hampshire and within a few years, Baer left the firm to work for Sanders Associates; a military defense contractor in 1956. He quickly rose through the company's ranks and by 1958 became Division Manager and Chief Engineer for Equipment Design.

It was at Sanders that he once more began to tinker around with the idea of inventing a way for people to essentially play games on their televisions. In 1966 he wrote up a 4-page paper about the idea of playing games on televisions and included a list of different game types that may be feasible such as board games, sports games, shooting games and action games.

As the division manager with over 500 people working for him, Baer opted to pull one technician off the line and have him play around with creating a device that could be hooked up to a television and allow people to play games on it. Though it wasn't long until he pitched the idea and showed some of his work and demos to his higher ups and eventually got the go-ahead from the heads of the company to use some of their resources on this idea.

 Yes kids, there was a time that EVERYTHING had faux-wood grain on it.

During 1968 and 1969 lots of ground had been made. With the assistance of Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, multiple games were developed and produced for the machine, now dubbed the "Brown Box." The games available on it were a shooting gallery game (including the first light gun), a maze game, a chasing game and a game based on ping pong.

As work on the prototype came to an end, everyone's attention was brought to figuring out how to market this new invention. Initially they went to cable television and attempted to get channels to allow games to  be played on them, though that simply didn't work and wasn't really feasible.

 A Magnavox Odyssey signed by Ralph Baer.

After the failure of getting cable television in on this new concept, the team moved to television manufacturers themselves. They demoed the unit to numerous manufacturers including Motorola, RCA and GE. Eventually Magnavox came around and expressed slight interest, though nothing came from negotiations for awhile. In 1971, Magnavox opted to license the Brown Box and changed its name to the Magnavox Odyssey, the first commercially available home video game console.

Ralph Baer had achieved something he had been working towards for nearly 20 years; allowing people to play games on the television. Though the Odyssey didn't do too well (more on that elsewhere), the industry had started. Soon enough, those notes he made back in 1966 were being brought up in numerous lawsuits over the legality of video games amongst different companies.

 AKA, the game that mocks you with color and sounds.

His days weren't over yet, not by a long shot. Between 1975 and 1976, he helped design games for COLECO and in 1975, he founded R.H. Baer and Consultants, where he helped oversee the design and production of numerous toys and games; including highly popular titles such as MANIAC and the hit memory skill game SIMON.

 MASK stood for Mobile Armored Strike Kommand. Because "Command" totally as a K in it.

After that time, his attention mainly stayed with toys and games. By 1987, he had retired from Sanders Associates and had developed a laser shooting game based on the MASK series named Laser Command.  During the 1990s, his inventions continued and he designed and patented the Sounds-By-Me talking book line for Western Publishing's Golden Books.

 In 2006 receiving the National Medal of Technology, Ralph Baer gives a thumbs up to his own awesomeness.

At the turn of the new millennium, Baer oversaw the reproduction of his early video game prototypes between 2004 and 2006, which were donated to a museum. In 2005,  he donated all original Brown Box units along with hundreds of pages of notes about them to The Smithsonian Institute. In 2006 he was honored by then-president George W. Bush with the National Medal of Technology and in 2010 he was finally inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Now at the age of 89, Baer stays fairly active and is very proud of the work he has done. He had lived to see his concept go from a system that had games pre-programmed on it and overlays to place over the television sets to help add color and create some sort of imagery to the current generation of gaming platforms with incredibly realistic graphics, hours of game play and more. The industry that he helped lay the groundwork for is a multi-billion dollar industry that has survived quite a bit.

Needless to say, I say we all take our hats off and salute this man. He has brought many, many of us hours of fun and has easily helped many people connect and foster friendships. Without him, the gaming industry would likely be radically different.

So, for his tireless work, I give him the highest honor that I can bestow on someone: Ralph Baer - Legendarily Awesome!

(Most of this information came from years of studying gaming history, with additional information coming from www.wikipedia.org and http://www.ralphbaer.com/)  

FACT! #14

Many people don't know, but there was a time that coins were minted in Oregon. The Provisional Government of Oregon authorized a mint to begin producing coins for the Oregon Territory. The US Government strictly forbids territories from minting their own coins, but at the time, it was unclear exactly whether the Oregon Territory was under United States or Great Britain's rule.

For one year, 1849, these coins were minted. But when Oregon was brought into the US, minting of these coins was deemed unconstitutional by Governor Joseph Lane (b. 1801 - d. 1881; the first and fourth governor of Oregon.) By this time, the Gold Rush had warranted a mint to be built in San Francisco and the Federal Government went about purchasing all these coins that they could, exchanging them with US money.

Today, these "Beaver" coins are very rare and even in low grades command in excess of $15,000 and higher.

FACT! #13

Released by Mars, Inc. in 1930; the Snickers bar received its name from the Mars' family's favorite horse. All I know is that Snickers definitely don't taste like a horse... As far as I know. I mean, that'd be... Weird if horses tasted like a Snickers bar.

Diagnosis: Pac-Man Fever

There are a few characters in all media that virtually everyone recognizes. Perhaps one of the most well known characters in the world would have to be Pac-Man. Debuting in 1980, the original Pac-Man went on to achieve success seldom seen by any individual character, much less a video game character. Over a quarter million arcade units have been installed, he had his own Saturday morning cartoon series in the 1980s, a top-ten hit single song named after him, numerous amounts of sequels and quite a few spin off products over his 30+ years of existence.

So to many it seems highly inconceivable that Pac-Man could be anything but great for the gaming industry. It definitely may appear that at the time, Pac-Man could do no harm. That is exactly where the biggest problem lay. There are times when the popularity of something or someone can be the bane of their own existence. Then again, it wouldn't be fair to blame Pac-Man completely as it was his popularity that was mishandled and misunderstood by developers.

They could've y'know, not spent so much time on the title screen

In the late-1970s, Atari was riding high as the king of the video game industry. They had made a deal with arcade gaming developer Namco to produce home console ports of their games. By the time Pac-Man had made it to the United States in late-1980 the game quickly became a resounding success. Thanks to their previous agreement, Atari began production on the home port of the game in 1981 ready to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.

What the crap happened to Pac-Man? Why does he have a savage under bite?

Tod Frye, a programmer and game designer, was tasked with converting the game from the arcade for the Atari 2600. Issues began at the start with the sheer difference between mediums. The original Pac-Man arcade machine was a much more powerful machine when compared to the Atari. The Pac-Man machine had 2KB of RAM while the cartridge version could only store 128B of RAM.

I wonder if the ghost was the spirit of failure. At least the dashes look delicious.

The technical limitations were enough to force Frye to strip down the graphics of the arcade machine. Pac-Man went from round to blocky, the dots/pills turned into long wafers and virtually anything rounded on the arcade version became blocky. The Atari 2600 version also simply redrew the map sans any "wafers" that had been consumed by Pac-Man.  There was only one ghost present in each frame, though it would rotate between the four to give the illusion that there were four.

But it wasn't just technical limitations that plagued the game. Tod Frye demanded to be paid royalties on each cartridge sold or he would abandon the project and transfer to Atari's growing competitor, Activsion. Atari relented and agreed to pay him $0.10 on each cartridge sold which, considering how high sales estimates were, meant that Frye could feasibly have become a millionaire.

The real issue was that Atari had too high of hopes for the game. They assumed that, due to its popularity, that all they had to do was keep the game play somewhat similar and that every single person who played Pac-Man would immediately go out and buy a copy of the cartridge for home use.  They also had fairly unrealistic expectations on how fast they could create the game; Frye had finished all the programming in just 6 weeks while initial hopes were to release the game for the holiday rush in 1981. This required Frye to cut as many corners as possible and even with that, it wasn't until March of 1982 that the game was finished.

Atari began to invest heavily into advertising the game before its launch, taking out ads in national publication, prompting J.C. Penny to take out a nation-wide television advertisement... The first of its kind in all of gaming up to that point.

  What a lie. They're implying Pac-Man was three dimensional and looked anything like normal.

 

Original estimates at the time was that there were approximately 10 million Atari 2600 systems were in use by people. Due to the success of the arcade version of Pac-Man, Atari opted to produce 12 million cartridges, expecting millions of more people to buy the 2600 just to play Pac-Man at home. This, in turn, would make Tod Frye a millionaire.

I thought they were suppose to be pills, not caffeinated gum. Unless it's joke gum. I hate this game.

The game was launched with incredible success, selling 7 million copies in the matter of months. Unfortunately, the public as a whole panned the game. Many were  disappointed by the stark differences in graphics and sound between the original and the port. Atari was soon stuck with 5 million in storage and that number began to grow as a surprising number of people returned the game demanding refunds.

The results were catastrophic. Warner Communications, which owned Atari at the time, quickly lost 35% of its stock value, resulting in over $1 billion in losses. Confidence in Atari dropped sharply among the public after the release and the game is seen as part of the fall of Atari. The game was such a failure that many people point to it and only a few other factors as the reason the video game market crashed in 1983 and almost ended the industry completely.

The game was perhaps doomed from the start considering the technological differences between arcade machines and the Atari 2600. In 1981, it was started to become a bit outdated and was simply unable to live up to the expectations everyone had of it and the game.

These cutting edge graphics are such a relief compared to the crap I was just writing about.

By the way, I've played it. It's... Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's nowhere near as good as the original and I question whether they could've actually captured and ported the arcade experience at home. I suppose if the joysticks had gum on them and they could've released a cassette with children screaming and the stench of broken dreams, they could've come close.

FACT! #12

Virtually everyone is familiar with the fact that Reese's Pieces were famously used to lure the alien E.T. out of the shed in 1982's "E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial" by Steven Spielberg. A product placement opportunity that wouldn't be outright outdone until 2004's "I, Robot" with the infamous Converse shoe scene.

Fewer people know that Reese's Pieces weren't the original choice for that scene. In fact, Spielberg actually wanted M&M's candy to be what lured the little space-man out of the shed. In what may be considered nowadays a colossal mistake, Mars, Inc. decided against allowing the use of their candy because, as the story goes, they "didn't want to associate their candy with aliens."

After the movie launched, sales of Reese's Pieces went through the roof, helping to revive the brand. It turned out that children, who command a good amount of their parent's money, fell in love with the alien and subsequently fell in love with Reese's Pieces.

I'm more-or-less surprised that kids didn't start picking up candy off of the ground on a regular basis after E.T. was released.

FACT! #11

Originally released in 1993; Panasonic's 3DO Interactive Multiplayer system was hailed as the product of the year by Time Magazine. Unlike many consoles then and now, which are sold essentially with no profit margin on the system itself in the hopes of recouping losses via media/game sales; Panasonic intended to make a profit on each system produced.

Because of their desire to profit on each system sold, the 3DO was originally retailed for $699.95 (which would be $1,042.65 in 2010 dollars) which rendered the system unattainable for mass consumption and made it sometimes twice as expensive as the far more popular systems at the time (Sega's Genesis, Nintendo's SNES.)

Due to Panasonic's refusal to lower the price under the premise that it was "more than a gaming system" and the highly anticipated releases of Sony's PlayStation, Sega's Saturn and Nintendo's N64 systems simply helped speed up the demise of the 3DO.

Currently, the 3DO routinely fetches $100+ per system due to its low availability and a surprising number of its games can go for $10 a pop as well.

FACT! #10

The Katzenjammer Kids (AKA, the Katzies, Hans und Fritz and more) debuted in 1897 in the New York Journal owned by William Randolph Heart (b. 1863 - d. 1951.) It was created by Rudolph Dirks (b. 1877 - d. 1968) and was highly popular during its time; though those higher up in society deemed the comic strip trash and was helping lead the youth of America astray and that the end of society was nigh.

Eventually, in 1914, Dirks was lured away from the New York Journal to the New York World which was originally owned by Joseph Pulitzer (b. 1847 - d. 1911) and had just moved into his three sons' hands. The Journal attempted to sue Dirks for ownership of the characters and the comic. The subsequent ruling followed the precedent set by a handful of other comics before hand; the name of the strip stayed with the Journal while Dirks could take the characters with him to the World. Thus, The Captain and the Kids came into being.

The rival comics, using very similar formats, characters and situations, continued to battle it out until 1979 when The Captain and the Kids finally folded; making it one of the most successful "imitation" comics in history.

As for The Katzenjammer Kids? It's still being syndicated; making it the longest running syndicated comic strip in history... It's currently on its 114th year and even with the slumping newspaper industry, there still appears to be quite a bit of life left in those eternally youthful kids.

1933 St. Gaudens Double Eagle $20 Gold Coin

The 1933 St. Gaudens Double Eagle $20 coin is perhaps the most famous single US coin in the world. It fetches virtually unheard of sums and draws the attention of the government whenever one is found. The FBI and CIA may be involved if you happen to find one of these coins. Now, why would it draw such attention and risk? Well...

 For most of its history, the United States had always produced gold coins as part of its regular minting. Though the dawning of the Great Depression brought about a financial lurch. In an attempt to help ease the effects of the depression, the US congress passed the Gold Reserve Act in early 1934. The purpose of the act was to nationalize all gold and required banks to turn their gold reserves over to the federal government in exchange for notes of equal value.

The Double Eagle coin (worth $20) was first minted in 1849 with proof forms. The coin was issued in 1850 and produced all the way until 1933. The first design was the head of Lady Liberty with a coronet on the obverse, the reverse had a bald eagle with a shield in front of it and the words "IN GOD WE TRUST" right above the head of the eagle and the mintmark below it. It should be noted that, for the first few years of its existence, the motto was not present. The coin was designed by master engraver James Longacre.

In the early part of the 20th Century, president Theodore Roosevelt requested that a personal friend of his, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, be allowed to design a coin without approval from congress because Roosevelt felt that coins at that time were "hideous." Using his authority, Roosevelt managed to not only convince Saint-Gaudens to redesign the $20 Double Eagle coin, but to actually get it into production with very little input from anyone else.

The St. Gaudens coin is widely considered to be one of, if not the, most beautiful coin ever produced by the US Mint. It consisted of Lady Liberty, representing Victory, on the front, boarded by numerous stars with low-horizon sun rays beaming up from behind her. The reverse was simple and consisted of a bald eagle in mid-flight with the sun below it. The mintmark sat beneath the date. Originally, the date was on the reverse in Roman Numerals.

First minted in 1907, the St. Gaudens Double Eagle was rarely circulated due to its high value ($20 being worth a couple hundred in spending power today) and was not minted in large numbers, ranging between a few hundred thousand to a couple million each year. It would continue to be minted until 1933.

At the end of the 1920s, the stock market crashed and launched the Great Depression. The government began to pull out all the stops and ordered the nation off of the gold standard. In 1933 tens of thousands of Double Eagles were minted. Though, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office, he ordered that none of the coins be made available for sale. At the time, the cashier of the Mint, Harry Powell, began to sell some of the coins off to banks and collectors. It was ruled that banks were to trade in all of their gold and golden certificates for paper money and, within the year, all Americans were required to return all gold coins and certificates in exchange for paper money.
 

It is estimated that fewer than two dozen 1933 Double Eagles are in existence and only a handful have ever been accounted for. Just after the ban on the coin, the secretary of the mint allegedly had more than five individual specimens in his position. During the early-to-mid 1940s, a couple of the coins were sold off by a prominent coin dealer and the issue regarding these coins were brought to the Mint's attention.

The Mint had no records of ever issuing the coins out and, because of that, declared that all remaining specimens were acquired by illegal means. The Secret Service was tasked with finding all specimens and melting them down. Two specimens were donated to the Smithsonian Institute by the federal government and can still be found there.

Though the history of the most prolific of these Double Eagles isn't completely known; what is known that one coin made it into the hands of Egypt's King Farouk I. When the king passed away in 1965, the coin went missing once more before being brought back to the US in the late-1990s. The Secret Service seized the coin and, after a legal battle, it was decided that the coin would be put up for auction legally and the amount it would go for would be evenly split  between the US government and the private owners. In 2002, the coin was sold for a record-shattering $7,590,020 at a Sotheby's auction.

Just recently, 10 specimens of the coin were sent to the Philidelphia Mint for verification where they were indeed verified and subsequently seized. The case is still pending and the trial should begin in July of this year.

The St. Gaudens Double Eagle coin is indeed a very sought after coin, thanks to its design, history and the sudden end of production that lead to a massive meltdown, keeping on a very, very small quantity of coins in private hands. It's definitely a very rare coin and I am sure we will hear of more of them being found in the future.

Though I do want to note, I personally don't think it's the most beautiful coin in US history. I still think that a proof Morgan Silver dollar is much more aesthetically appealing. Though I won't lie... Gold is much prettier than silver.

FACT! #9 - Double Dip!

The United States Patent Office granted, essentially, the patent for trading/collectible card games to Wizards of the Coast back in 1997 for their Magic: The Gathering card game. Though it has constantly been called into question, they still manage to retain the patent on many mechanics that dictate an entire industry.

I usually wouldn't do a FACT! request, but this is a special case... Since it stumped me

There is only one state in the United States that has one syllable... Maine. It was also one of the original 13 colonies and is the namesake of Portland, Oregon. But really, we just wanted to prove we could do Portland right.

Now send me some more Moxie!

FACT! #8

During the 1920s and into the early years of the Great Depression, the owners of Pepsi offered to sell their formula to Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola rejected it, of course, and to this day has had to fight Pepsi to remain the most popular soda brand in the world. One story is that Coca-Cola decided that it wasn't "worth their time" to purchase the recipe.

A man named Charles Guth (b. 1876 - d. 1948) owned a number of stores that happened to have soda fountains. After having Coca-Cola refuse his request to sell their syrup to him at a discount, he began shopping around for alternatives. He found that the owners of the Pepsi trademark and formula wanted to sell their company and he quickly snatched it up and, after having the exact formula tweaked a bit, began offering it at his stores.