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/)
