Dead Ralph Baer, ​​the father of video games: he invented Pong – The Press

The world says goodbye to the father of video games, the inventor of the unforgettable Pong: Ralph Baer, ​​who in the late sixties created the prototype of the modern console, patenting the first system to play from home through television, is died Saturday at age 92 at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire. To confirm the death were relatives.

Baer was born in Germany in 1922 and emigrated with his family in the United States during World War II, to escape persecution against Jews. He attended the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago, and after getting the title of Bachelor of Science in engineering television began working for Sanders Associates, a company based in New Hampshire.

In 1966, he created a simple video game called “Chase” which could be displayed on a normal television, and the following year he invented another game in two players with Bill Harrison, “Bucket Filling Game”. Baer and Harrison continued to work on the project, and in 1968 was born a prototype of the modern console, the so-called `Brown Box’: the system, later evolved into” Magnavox Odyssey “, allowed to engage in various games, including a simple tennis simulation and target shooting.

Baer has created many games like Simon, Simon and Super Maniac, but also one of the first additional peripherals, a light gun with which you could shoot the objects that appeared on the screen. Ideas that today seem obvious, but which at the time were absolutely revolutionary.

From the “Brown Box” Baer descend PlayStation, Xbox and Wii, the products of the microprocessor revolution, so that in the course of his career he has received more than 150 patents in and outside America. In 2006, President George W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Technology, and in 2010 was admitted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Speaking with the PBS network, one day Baer revealed: “It’s as if I were an artist. No different than a painter, who sits there and loves what he does. ” “Developing new ideas and turn them into real objects for me has always been as natural as breathing,” he wrote in 2005 in his autobiography instead “Videogames: In the Beginning.”

Nancy Baer leaves three sons, Mark and James, and four grandchildren. The wife Dena Whinston, with whom he was married for 53 years, died in 2006.