French – English
Ralph Baer (1922-2014)
November 30, 2012 – The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Ralph Baer, creator of the Odyssey and considered the father of video games, has just joined the association as an honorary member.
He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Born on March 8, 1922 in Pirmasens in Germany, Ralph Baer was excluded from school at the age of eleven because of his Jewish origins. He left the country with his family in August 1938 to settle in New York, in the Bronx. Baer works at his mother's cousin's factory to support his family. At the same time, he took correspondence courses at the National Radio Institute and obtained his radio and television maintenance diploma in 1940. In 1943, he was drafted into the army. This allowed him to join a university after the war, where he obtained the very first television engineering degree, in Chicago in 1949. He started as chief engineer in an electro-medical equipment company, then in 1951 for Loral Electronics, in military electronics. He married in 1953 and continued his career at Transitron, and finally joined Sanders Associates in 1956 as division manager, then emeritus engineer at Sanders-Lockheed until his retirement in 1987. It was in 1966 that he had the idea of creating a system for playing video games on a regular television. He develops numerous prototypes with his two partners, negotiates with different companies and works on innovative projects such as gaming via cable network. He also invented the very first optoelectronic gun intended for video games. His research led to the famous Brown Box in early 1968. But it was not until 1971 that the television manufacturer Magnavox purchased the license and marketed it under the name Odyssey the following year, the very first games console in history. The machine enjoyed some success with 350,000 machines in two years, but the competition quickly became tough; lawsuits multiplied with other manufacturers (notably Atari, whose Pong was a copy of the Odyssey ping-pong game) and Baer was unable to convince Magnavox to invest more in its subsequent inventions linked to this emerging industry. He was a consultant for Coleco for some time, notably finding a very simple technique for offering color games and participating in the design of several machines. He also contributed to the development of the Odyssey² which was finally released in 1978 but failed to compete with the Atari VCS 2600 in the United States; Rather, it was in Europe that it experienced success under the name Videopac, as well as in South America. At the end of the 70s, Ralph Baer invented many successful electronic toys like Simon or Maniac. During the 80s, he continued to create concepts that were far ahead of their time, such as the use of a camera to integrate faces into games or movement recognition! For 35 years he has continued to invent games and toys independently. Since 2005, he has received numerous distinctions, including the National Medal of Technology in 2006 presented by President George W. Bush. He has also been inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame, is a medal member of the Institute of Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a distinguished engineer at Lockheed and holds an honorary doctorate of laws. Ralph Baer passed away on December 6, 2014.
Ralph Baer's memoirs are published by Pix'n Love
The Brown Box and its optoelectronic rifle (1968)
Magnavox Odyssey (1972) (photo: François Doury)
Philips Videopac c52, the European version of the Odyssey² (1979)
Simon (1978)
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