Ralph H. Baer

Ralph Henry Baer (1922 to 2014) was a German-born American inventor, game developer and engineer, called the father of video games. His Jewish family fled Germany for New York in 1938, and after wartime service in military intelligence he studied television engineering in Chicago and worked for several electronics firms. In 1956 he joined the defence contractor Sanders Associates in Nashua, New Hampshire, where he oversaw about 500 engineers. Around 1966 he conceived the idea of playing games on a television screen and, with two assistants, built the prototype Brown Box, patented in 1973, which was licensed to Magnavox in 1971 and sold from 1972 as the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console. He also helped design the electronic game Simon, held over 150 patents and received the National Medal of Technology in 2006 and the IEEE Edison Medal in 2014.