Ralph H. Baer, the man widely acknowledged as the "father of home video games" for his pioneering work in electronics and television engineering, died on Saturday at his home in Manchester, N.H. He was 92.
Video games have become a ubiquitous, billion-dollar industry that has in recent years surpassed the movie business. Titles in the Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty franchises often sell millions of copies within days of release. But all of that — as well as the Playstations, the Xboxes and the Wiis – can be traced back to Baer's work and his "Brown Box."
By the 1960s, millions of Americans had invested in televisions for their homes, and it soon became clear that this technology could be used for more than passively watching television shows. In 1966, while working for Sanders Associates Inc., engineer Ralph Baer began to investigate how to play games on a television. Between 1967 and 1969, he and colleagues Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch created several video game test units. This result was the “Brown Box,” a prototype for the first multiplayer, multiprogram video game system. Sanders licensed the system to Magnavox. In 1972, Magnavox released the design as the Magnavox Odyssey, paving the way for all video game systems that followed.
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