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Ralph H. Baer, a Father of Video Gaming, Dies At 92

Posted by samzenpus on from the rest-in-peace dept.

SternisheFan writes with news that Ralph H Baer, the father of video games and the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, has passed away at 92. "At the dawn of the television age in 1951, a young engineer named Ralph Baer approached executives at an electronics firm and suggested the radical idea of offering games on the bulky TV boxes. 'And of course,' he said, 'I got the regular reaction: "Who needs this?" And nothing happened.' It took another 15 years before Mr. Baer, who died Dec. 6 at 92, developed a prototype that would make him the widely acknowledged father of video games. His design helped lay the groundwork for an industry that transformed the role of the television set and generated tens of billions of dollars last year. Mr. Baer 'saw that there was this interesting device sitting in millions of American homes — but it was a one-way instrument,' said Arthur P. Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. 'He said, "Maybe there's some way we can interact with this thing."'"

47 comments

  1. He said not to worry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    He's still being emulated on the new video game programmers.

  2. A fine man by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My thanks go out to Mr Baer, for allowing me to waste a good chuck of my life playing vidya.

  3. R.I.P. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thank you, Sir.

  4. Farewell, Ralph by binarylarry · · Score: 1

    Ralph Baer

    There I was back in the wild again.
    I felt right at home, where I be-long.
    I had the feeling, coming over me again.
    Just like it happened so many times be-fore. eh.
    The Spirit of the Codes is like an old good friend.
    Makes me feel warm and good in-side.
    I knew his name and it was good to see him again.
    Cause in the wind he's still a-live.
    Oh Ralph Baer
    Walk with me down the codetrails again.
    Take me back, back where I be-long.
    Ralph Baer
    I'm glad to have you at my side my friend
    And I'll join you in the bug hunt before too long
    Before too long.
    It was kinda dark, another misty dusk
    It came from a tangle down be-low.
    I tried to re-mem-ber everything you taught me so well.
    I had to de-cide which way to go.
    Was I a-lone or in a gamer's dream.
    Cause the moment of truth was here and now.
    I felt his touch I felt his guiding hand.
    The game was mine forever more!!
    Oh Ralph Baer
    Walk with me down the codetrails again.
    Take me back, back where I be-long.
    Ralph Baer
    I'm glad to have you at my side my friend
    And I'll join you in the bug hunt before too long
    Before too long.
    We're not alone when we're in the great outdoors
    We got his spirit We got his soul
    He will guide our steps and our breakpoints home
    The restless spirit still roams
    Oh Ralph Baer
    Walk with me down the codetrails again.
    Take me back, back where I be-long.
    Ralph Baer
    I'm glad to have you at my side my friend
    And I'll join you in the bug hunt before too long
    Before too long.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:Farewell, Ralph by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...Burma Shave?

    2. Re:Farewell, Ralph by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      tl;dr

    3. Re:Farewell, Ralph by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      ...Burma Shave?

      Ted Nugent, as a matter of fact.

    4. Re:Farewell, Ralph by jfdavis668 · · Score: 1

      I would mod this as Funny, but I have not points right now.

  5. The Magnavox Odyssey by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Wow, my family owned a Magnavox Odyssey. It was so awesome yet primitive. The controllers had trim pots so that you used to fine tune the actual gaming/control potentiometers, and the graphics were so minimal that the system came with plastic overlays that you would tape to your TV screen to provide the actual play environment.

    RIP you brilliant guy!

    1. Re:The Magnavox Odyssey by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      What TFA and Wikipedia don't say are what game his original prototype actually was. Presumably it was similar to one of the early Odyssey games.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    2. Re:The Magnavox Odyssey by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      What TFA and Wikipedia don't say are what game his original prototype actually was. Presumably it was similar to one of the early Odyssey games.

      He invented the Brown Box, which later became the Magnavox Odyssey. The Odyssey is unlike what we'd call a console today in that it didn't run a stored program - instead it was a collection of analog circuits and the "cartridges" really were plugboards that connected the circuits in various ways.

      Basically it ended up being games like tennis, table tennis (a bit more complex than pong), and other bat-and-ball style games.

    3. Re:The Magnavox Odyssey by SternisheFan · · Score: 1
      ArsTechnica has reposted their article on Mr. Ralph H. Baer from a few years back. It covers the patent fights with Atari, and the hit game Simon (and it's sequel) were both Baer inventions. The mans life story is inspiring.

      http://www.arstechnica.com/gam...

    4. Re:The Magnavox Odyssey by Creepy · · Score: 1

      Can't recall gameplay, but most major sports had games (football, baseball, basketball, hockey). I also remember the color overlays for the TV. My age was in the single digits when I played this console, so I don't remember much (and certainly don't remember when it came out - played it maybe mid-to-late 1970s).

  6. If Baer is the Father of Gaming... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Then consider me Miles Davis.

  7. Sigh the regular reaction. by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    We wonder why a lot of the pioneers in technology, are often (they are exceptions) are very aggressive and cut throat.
    Because the rest of the population is so reluctant to change that new ideas are often thrown out the window, to get such change going you need people who have enough skin and perseverance to get it threw.

    That is why often the better designed product fails in the market while the inferior one make it. It is often from the idea the technology will sell itself... While in our imperfect world, you need people to sell it.

    Thank you Mr. Baer for sticking to your guns and help move us into the future.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  8. I owned one of those! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I had an Odyssey and remember it fondly. Sadly, now, even most so-called "gamers" have never heard of it, despite it being arguably the world's first game console.

    1. Re:I owned one of those! by oldmac31310 · · Score: 1

      eh. I've heard of it and don't really consider myself a gamer. Do I win a prize? There has to be something good about today. Please?

      --
      http://www.acetonestudio.com
  9. Game Over by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sorry - it seems appropriate and I think he would appreciate the joke.

    I have a personal connection to this story. My Dad was a component engineer at Sander's Associates in Nashua, NH during that time. He helped acquire specialty transistors required for the design. We were also fortunate to get one of the original Magnovox game systems in our house. Fast forward 30 some odd years to find me playing quake 3 until 1am most nights. I have now passed to torch to my children who obsess over TF2, Minecraft, Civ V, etc.

  10. A life well lived. by Esra+Erimez · · Score: 2

    What fascinates me about Mr. Bear is that he wasn't a "one-hit-wonder". He continued to innovate. He was also the inventor of Simon, and created the first light gun. Ars has an artical that's a good read about him.

    --
    Esra Erimez
  11. Goodbye Mr Baer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Goodbye, Mr. Baer. Thanks for all the fun, and shame on me because I didn't even know you existed until after you were gone.

  12. RIP Ralph by fleeped · · Score: 1

    Your vision became my lifetime hobby, work and creativity outlet.

  13. Odyssey 2 was awesome- by gatzke · · Score: 1

    I never saw the Odyssey, but the Odyssey 2 was a thing of beauty. When we were playing with our crappy Atari 2600, my buddy with a O2 had great graphics, analog joysticks, and a keyboard built in.

    Too much golden age nostalgia!

    1. Re:Odyssey 2 was awesome- by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      Nonsense. The Odyssey 2 if anything demonstrates how other people should be free to improve upon the "inventions" of others. It was a poorly executed system with horrible games. I had one and didn't even want it. I would have much preferred a 2600 or pretty much anything else. The Intellivision in particular was rather sophisticated for it's time.

      Baer's designs have the signs of being a little too ambitious and sometimes incomplete.

      If Bushnell and others shamelessly copied him, then sure he should be held up as everyone's inspiration. His own work is kind of meh.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    2. Re:Odyssey 2 was awesome- by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      The Intellivision in particular was rather sophisticated for it's time.

      16 bits and snazzy graphics, too bad they didn't offer a meaningful memory upgrade and computer interface for it. I'd probably still have mine.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:Odyssey 2 was awesome- by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      " sophisticated for it's time."

      But using extra apostrophes is unsophisticated.

    4. Re:Odyssey 2 was awesome- by kackle · · Score: 1

      I double-negate your "nonsense"! :) Both the Atari 2600 (which I pined for in the late 1970s and finally owned in the early 1990s) and the O2 (which I had in the late 1970s) had advantages and disadvantages.

      The O2 had a built-in keyboard which allowed for general text inputting (e.g., high scores), and the eventual purchase of a cheap "learn programming" cartridge for me. I was coding in assembly and machine language before I was a teenager. It is probably the reason I am a software developer today.

      The O2 had well-made joysticks; my original, ~40-year old joysticks still work like new today. The Atari's sticks were poorly designed with that plastic flex-return mechanism and short-lived microswitches. I had to fix so many of those over the years for friends.

      The Atari usually had better graphics, but the O2's screens were always flicker-free; something the Atari could not boast for every game.

      Atari's library of games was huge, but some of them were poor. O2's line-up was thinner, but some of the games were quite creative, complete with game boards, tokens, and playing pieces. (My Minecraft-playing niece and nephew say they love "Take The Money And Run!") It was a lot of fun, and is surprisingly still entertaining.

      Either way, I know Ralph Baer's story, and I respect what he's done for (to?) all of us. I thank him for creating such a clever invention.

  14. Although he died, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He re spawned at his last completed level.

  15. Re:And thus began the permanent slump in productiv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Producing what, exactly? I keep hearing this word, but what does it mean? "Productive" just seems to mean shifting bits around in a computer these days?

    " What if we instead put more of our time into meaningful aspects of life and building a better future?"

    We already are awash in excess capacity and production. We choose to throw it away to maintain the illusion that is the "economy".

    You'll have to change human nature itself if you want a better future.

  16. Re:And thus began the permanent slump in productiv by ChrisMaple · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Read to improve your mind. Learn a craft. Educate your children instead of relying on the government to indoctrinate them. Maintain and improve your property. Fix something yourself instead of calling on the town/city/state to fix it. Give time to charity. Learn economics and history so that your vote doesn't cause damage. Get to know your neighbors. Go to a museum. Explore. Think of a difficult problem, design fixes for it, then figure out what's wrong with the fixes.

    --
    Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
  17. How did it work without a CPU? by baka_toroi · · Score: 1

    OK, so I don't know much about logic gates and stuff but I still can't understand how can you create a video game console without a CPU. Apparently the Magnavox Odyssey was a pure analog console. How can you achieve such a thing?

    1. Re:How did it work without a CPU? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Apparently the Magnavox Odyssey was a pure analog console. How can you achieve such a thing?

      http://www.pong-story.com/2455992.pdf

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:How did it work without a CPU? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is what you sound like to me:

      OK, so I don't know much about programming and stuff but I still can't understand how you create $VIDEOGAME without a game engine. Apparently the $VIDEOGAME was written in pure C. How can you achieve such a thing?

      That is to say, just as you can create a game via leveraging prebuilt functions of an existing engine or write the code yourself in $LANGUAGE, you can create $PROGRAM via leveraging prebuilt functions of $HARDWARE or design the dedicated hardware itself to perform the logic. We also had 3D graphics before hardware accelerated triangle rendering boards too. Specialized hardware/software platforms can be useful (especially if processing or development time is a bottleneck) but they are far from necessary. In fact, I often find them limiting and/or wasteful.

      E.g.,with a software rasterizer instead of GPU rendering pipeline I only needed one copy of the geometry in memory at a time, and the input/network/physics functions can operate on the same geometry data as the rendering system uses; Contrast that with having an asset manager to shovel data across the tiny graphics bus, and often keeping two or more copies of 3D data in memory: One for physics on the "CPU" side, one for rendering on the GPU side of the bus, one for network state updates and lag-compensation (because functional programming lends itself to batches, and multiple cores exist). With a fully programmable pipeline (yay geometry shaders!) we're finally getting back most of the freedom we had back in software only rendering. With shared memory architecture we're finally getting back most of the freedom we had in CPU side only rendering. Perhaps with something like faster reprogrammable FPGAs we'll finally get back some of the freedom we lost to CPUs when we migrated away from ASIC. Well, the game cartridges COULD have their own logic and data, and other custom circuits, but they weren't really ASIC since they could provide input devices too, see GBA games with photocells to change the game world to match your environmental light or with mics, or carts with save functions built-in made for consoles without data storage, etc.

      You see, someday when we're forced to 3D print all our own chips because of the Ken Thompson Hack (which indicates we can't trust any software or hardware stack one didn't create oneself) we'll finally have back the freedom to create video games we once had when the game wasn't restricted to running on existing (read: shitty/limited) hardware.

      TL;DR: Would you like to know more?

    3. Re:How did it work without a CPU? by dissy · · Score: 1

      OK, so I don't know much about logic gates and stuff but I still can't understand how can you create a video game console without a CPU.

      A CPU is nothing but a ton of logic gates wired mostly to each other inside of a tiny package, and logic gates are made from multiple transistors.

      Here is a page showing how each type of logic gate is made from transistors:
      http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...

      Within a logic gate chip, all gates have their ground and power lines wired together and out to two pins on the chip, while the inputs/outputs typically also end up at pins on the chip, with everything else being internal to the IC.

      Scaling up a level you can wire together multiple gates similarly.
      A CPU is generally nothing but thousands to billions of these transistors wired together into gates that are wired together into "logical blocks" (think basic lego parts put together to form shapes, which you make a lot of, and then build your thing with the shapes)
      This is why even today CPUs generally have a "transistor count", the number of the most basic elements on the chip making those gates that make up logical blocks that end up actually doing things.

      The first CPUs in fact were boards (and boards and boards) of nothing but transistors wired together this way, before we could put them on a tiny silicon package in a small enough form to be called a microchip.

      The first chips (at least that I am aware of) that packaged standard gates together in an IC is the 7400 line of chips. A 7402 chip for example contains four separate NOR gates for example.

      Here is a Z80 CPU built using nothing but these 7400 gate chips:
      http://cpuville.com/Z80.htm

      The Z80 was used in home computers like the TRS-80, the ZX Spectrum, the Osborne, and I think even some of the old Commodore line. It was also in the original Nintendo Gameboy and Gameboy Color, and a ton more systems.
      It's still used today although more for things we would think of as embedded devices. I have a SCSI card powered by one, for example.

      Instead of a tiny IC measuring roughly an inch squared, when using 7400 chips the CPU is as large as you see in the picture on that page.

      Just as it is rare to code in assembly these days, assemblers take higher level commands that consist of many assembly instructions and compiles those high level instructions down to blocks of assembly code (and then proceeds, hopefully, to optimize those blocks... but pretending optimization is disabled may give you a better idea visually)

      Hope that explains some of it and didn't make the confusion worse ;}

    4. Re:How did it work without a CPU? by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      Depends on what you mean by pure analog. As I understand it, the Odyssey was a digital device, but implemented using lower level components than were used later. Digital logic, even in the latest CPU, is always built upon lower level components that are essentially analog in nature, with the various circuits used to produce 1s and 0s.

      Hey, here's a question: A CRT TV. We'll go further: a CRT TV built by EMI in the 1920 or 1930s. 100% analog? Or did it contain at least one digital circuit?

      (Hint: somehow it was keeping track of the exactly 405 - in the case of the System A TV I just described - lines it had to display. What's even more awesome is that the digital circuit involved wasn't using binary arithmetic...)

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  18. Similar to Joe Weisbecker by ggendel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A similar story was told to me about Joe Weisbecker when he was working in the RCA research laboratories. He came to management with an idea for a general purpose video game system. After rejection, he built it anyway in his garage and called it FRED (something like fun, recreational, education device).

    When microprocessors just started taking off, management came back to Joe and made FRED into it's first microprocessor, the 1801 and RCA created it's first video game system called Studio. The 1800 family had a very intriguing architecture. It had 16 general purpose registers. And by general purpose, I mean that you had to specify which one would be the program pointer, which one would be the stack pointer, and so on. You could change them at will in your program so you could switch the program pointer register to make a subroutine call with virtually no overhead as long as the last subroutine instruction put it back to the calling procedure's pointer. Putting a value in the accumulator automatically set the status flags. It took me many hours make my first 8008 program work since I was expecting the "zero" flag to be set when I loaded the accumulator with a zero value, silly me. It also had an instruction pipe so almost every instruction (except for long ones) took exactly 8 clock cycles (long took 12). This made it trivial to figure out how long your program would take (just count the instructions) or write UART functionality. It was a perfect design for a micro controller. The big drawback was cost as it was fabricated in SOS CMOS so it could be radiation resistant in satellite applications.

    Joe was an interesting character. I have a book he wrote that describes how computers work by using pennies.

    1. Re:Similar to Joe Weisbecker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You know all this presumably off the top of your head, but you don't know that it's means it is?

    2. Re:Similar to Joe Weisbecker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's a typo, and an extremely common one at that. Likely not even conscious. Not sure why that is worthy of comment.

  19. Re:And thus began the permanent slump in productiv by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    And yet if you don't pay your mortgage or pay for your groceries you'll be homeless and starving within months, in a society that has managed to automate and improve productivity by orders of magnitude.
    None of the items you list doing help with the basic problem that the "economy" is a consensual human-built system, and has nothing to do with the physical reality that even if you're starving grocery stores still throw out "bad" food by the container, daily.
    My house was built in 6 months using engineered materials built in a factory and mechanized tools, yet I have to "pay" for it for 25 years while a bank collects interest. How is the bank "productive"?
    How does reading a book convince a bank to change bits in a computer so bailiffs don't show up at my door?

  20. today there are millions of consoles... by m.alessandrini · · Score: 1

    ... connected to tvs, but we cannot develop software for them. Ironic.

  21. Hitchhiking does have it's downsides by tomxor · · Score: 0

    Just because it's monetised doesn't make hitching any safer :P ... classic

    1. Re:Hitchhiking does have it's downsides by tomxor · · Score: 1

      Who the fuck modded this off topic... is it not obvious enough that uber is basically hitch-hiking with a smart phone while making money. Do i have to spell out everything?

  22. Interview excerpt... by SternisheFan · · Score: 1
    Baer sued Atari over patent infringement when Atari introduced Pong, and for a long time there was bad blood between him and Bushnell.

    What are you feelings about Atari's Nolan Bushnell? He took a lot of credit in the media as being the "father of video games.":

    Baer: There was a demonstration of the Odyssey in California, which was attended by one Nolan Bushnell. He played the ping-pong game hands-on. He went back to his partner, Ted Dabney, and they hired Al Alcorn. Al had just graduated from the university up there. Nolan gave Al the job of building a ping-pong game. Al got done, and it was Pong. Pong became the successful start of the arcade business. Almost simultaneously, the home and arcade businesses were launched. Look, I'm 87. I'm long past the point of carrying grudges, and I'm much more philosophical than I might have been 30 years ago. I always respected Bushnell for having the guts to start a company with almost no money, along with his partner Ted Dabney, who never seems to get any credit even though he did most of the work in the beginning. He was the only technical guy there. Nolan didn't know from anything, but he was a damn good marketer. He was good at hiring very good people, like Al Alcorn and some brilliant guys.

    http://www.gameinformer.com/b/...

  23. Requiescat In Pace by DRJR · · Score: 1

    Requiescat In Pace: Ralph Henry Baer, March 8, 1922 ~ December 6, 2014

    From the creation of the Magnavox Odyssey to the co-creation of Simon...

    You will be missed, Good Sir.

    --Dave Romig, Jr.

  24. Hardly the father...! by mlauzon · · Score: 1

    Hardly the 'father of video games', seeing as how:

    Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947), Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann.

    Chess (1947–1958), Alan Turing and Dietrich Prinz.

    Bertie the Brain (1950), Dr. Josef Kates.

    Nim (1951), Ferranti.

    Strachey's Draughts Program (1951), Christopher Strachey.

    OXO / Noughts and Crosses (1952), Alexander S. Douglas.

    Tennis for Two (1958), William Higinbotham.

    Mouse in the Maze, Tic-Tac-Toe (1959)

    Spacewar! (1961), Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen.

    Odyssey (1966), Ralph H. Baer.

    As you can see, Baer doesn't show up until the mid-60s, so he's not the father!

    --
    Michael
    http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163