Although Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are household names, there
are not many who have heard of Ralph Baer although his
contribution to the home entertainment industry is arguably at
par with Jobs and Gates. Baer was the inventor of the video
game; he was the pioneer whose inventions gave birth to the
gaming entertainment industry which is predicted to be around
111 billion dollars in 2015 (according to Gartner Inc). Baer (who
passed away on 6th December, 2014 at the age of 92) has left
behind a trail of relentless inventing abilities.
Baer fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938 and was recruited
into the US Army in 1943 working for the military intelligence. At
the age of 23, when the era of television dawned on the world,
he returned to Europe to pursue a career as a TV engineer. He
initially conceptualised the one-way model of broadcast to allow
viewers to interact with images on TV during the mid-fifties. His
employers, however, found his ideas to be outlandish and too
expensive to implement.
It was only in 1966, while waiting at a bus stop that he started
reflecting once again about TV based games. After he had created
a very basic and crude model that allowed two users to play “tag”
on television by moving two dots around, he was granted an
amount of $2500 as funding by his employer. With this funding,
Baer worked towards making a more compact and functionally
easier model. In the process he also invented the ‘light gun’ that
allowed the user to point ‘guns’ at the TV as a mode of
interaction. The seventh iteration of the machine (called “The
Brown Box”) was completed in 1968 and it could output in colour
and could run a few games including “Table Tennis”.
Companies like Motorola and General Electric still failed to be
impressed and showed no interest in manufacturing Baer’s
device. However, the electronics company Magnavox decided to
give it a try and in 1972, it produced a cut-down version of Baer’s
machine and named it Magnavox Odyssey. Thus the very first
commercially available home video game console was launched.
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