Ralph Henry Baer (born Rudolf Heinrich Baer; March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-American video game pioneer, inventor, engineer, and was known as "The Father of Video Games", and was noted for his many contributions to games and the video game industry.

Born in Germany, he and his family fled to America before World War II, where he changed his name and later served the American war effort. Afterwards, he pursued work in electronics, and in the 1960s, came up with the idea of playing games on television screens. He would go on to develop and patent several hardware prototypes, including what would become the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, and other consoles and consumer game units. In 2004, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology for "his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms".

Baer was born in 1922 to Lotte (Kirschbaum) and Leo Bauer, a Jewish family living in Germany, and was originally named Rudolf Heinrich Baer. At age 11, he was expelled from school in because of his ancestry and had to go to an all-Jewish school. His father worked in a shoe factory in Pirmasens at the time. Two months before Kristallnacht, he and his family escaped from Germany, relocating to New York City.

In the United States, he was self-taught and worked in a factory for a weekly wage of twelve dollars; on seeing an advisement on a bus for education in the budding electronics field, he opted to quit his factory job and proceeded to study in the field. He graduated from the National Radio Institute as a radio service technician in 1940. In 1943 he was drafted to fight in World War II, assigned to military intelligence at the US Army headquarters in London. With his secondary education funded by the G.I. Bill, Baer graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Television Engineering (unique at the time) from the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago in 1949.

In 1949, Baer went to work as chief engineer for a small electro medical equipment firm, Wappler, Inc where he designed and built surgical cutting machines, epilators, and low frequency pulse generating muscle-toning equipment. In 1951, Baer went to work as a senior engineer for Loral Electronics in Bronx, New York, where he designed power line carrier signaling equipment for IBM. From 1952 to 1956, he worked at Transitron, Inc., in New York City as a chief engineer and later as vice president. He started his own company before joining defense contractor Sanders Associates in 1956, where he stayed until retiring in 1987.

Baer was best known for leading the development of the Brown Box and Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console and his pioneering patented work in establishing video games. Baer later partnered with Bob Pelovitz of Acsiom, LLC, and they invented and marketed toy and game ideas from 1983 until Baer's death.

Baer was a Life Senior Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. His son, Mark, helped lead the nomination process to elevate him to become an IEEE Life Fellow, the highest level of membership within the organization.

Baer had married Dena Whinston in 1952, who passed away in 2006. They had three children during their marriage, and at the time of Baer's death, he had four grandchildren. Baer passed away at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire on December 6, 2014, according to family and friends close to him.

Inventions

Baer was considered to be the inventor of video games; in 1966 Baer, an employee of the defense-electronics company Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire (now part of BAE Systems Inc.), started to explore the possibility of playing games on television screens. In a 2007 interview, Baer said that he recognized that the price reduction of owning a television set at the time had opened a large potential market for other applications, considering that various military groups had identified ways of using television for their purposes. Upon coming up with creating a game using the television screen, he wrote a four page document which with he was able to convince one of his supervisors to proceed. He was given USD$2,500 and the aid of two other engineers, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch, developing the "Brown Box" console video game system, named as such due to the brown tape he used to wrap the units to simulate wood grain. Baer recounted that in an early meeting with a patent examiner and his attorney to patent one of the prototypes, he had set up the prototype on a television in the examiner's office and "within 15 minutes, every examiner on the floor of that building was in that office wanting to play the game".

Baer began seeking a buyer for the system, turning to various television manufacturers who did not see interest in the unit. In 1971, it was licensed to Magnavox, and after being renamed Magnavox Odyssey, the console was released to the public in 1972. For a time it was Sanders' most profitable line, selling approximately 300,000 units, though many in the company looked down on game development. Baer is credited for creating the first light gun and game for home television use, sold grouped with a game expansion pack for the Odyssey, and collectively known as the Shooting Gallery. The light gun itself was the first peripheral for a video game console.

The success of the Odyssey led to competition from other companies, in particular Atari Inc., led by Nolan Bushnell at the time. Bushnell saw Baer's successful devices and was able to create the first arcade machine in 1973 based on Baer's Table Tennis idea, resulting in Pong. Sanders and Magnavox successfully sued Atari for patent infringement over Baer's original ideas, but Bushnell would continue to push to lead Atari to become a leader in both home and arcade video games. This led to a lengthy conflict between Baer and Bushnell over who was the true "father of video games"; Baer was willing to concede this to Bushnell, though noted that Bushnell "has been telling the same nonsensical stories for 40 years". Baer would help both Magnavox and later Coleco to develop competitive units to Atari's products including the Odyssey 100 and the Odyssey 2.

During 1978–79 he, along with others, created three popular electronic games. Baer, along with Howard J. Morrison, developed Simon (1978) and its sequel Super Simon (1979) for Milton Bradley, electronic pattern-matching games that was immensely popular through the late 1990s.[27] Baer also developed a similar pattern-matching game "Maniac" for the Ideal Toy Company (1979) on his own, though the game was not as popular as Simon; Baer considered that Maniac was "really hard to play" and thus not as popular as his earlier game.

In 2006, Baer donated all his hardware prototypes and documents to the Smithsonian Institution. He continued to tinker in electronics after the death of his wife through at least 2013. By the time of his death, Baer had over 150 patents in his name.

Awards

In addition to being considered "The Father of Video Games", Baer was recognized as a pioneer in the video game field. His accolades include the G-Phoria Legend Award (2005), the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award (2008), the Game Developers Conference Developers Choice "Pioneer" award (2008), and the IEEE Edison Medal (2014).

On February 13, 2006, Baer was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George W. Bush in honor of his "groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games". On April 1, 2010, Baer was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at a ceremony at the United States Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.