We pay our respects to pioneering console inventor Ralph Baer, who sadly passed away on Saturday.
The games industry owes a huge debt to inventor Ralph H Baer. He was the inventor of the first console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which he began designing in the late 60s and went on sale in 1972.
Predating the Atari 2600 by several years, the Odyssey has many of the features you'd expect to find on a console: analog controllers, game cartridges, and even an optional, add-on light gun. It's said that 330,000 Odysseys were sold during its three-year lifespan - not a bad number, given the nascent state of the games industry at the time.
The Odyssey's pioneering ideas rightly earned Baer the nickname "the father of video games", and many of his ideas were hungrily picked up by other companies: Magnavox successfully sued Atari over the similarities between its arcade game Pong and the Odyssey's Tennis, which had appeared six months earlier.
Baer's other great invention - which he developed with toy designer Howard J Morrison - was Simon, an electronic game which quickly became ubiquitous in the late 70s and early 80s. A masterpiece of product design, its rules were simple - replicate the order of the flashing colored lights by striking the buttons - and its ramping difficulty deliciously addictive. Simon was a best-selling toy when it came out in 1978, and inspired numerous clones.
Baer continued to create electronic toys and games for the rest of his life, from the Odyssey 100 and Odyssey 2 consoles for Magnavox to electronic toys such as Maniac, Computer Perfection, and Laser Command.
Receiving numerous awards for his groundbreaking work, including a National Medal of Technology in 2006 and a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2010, Baer was one of the gaming industry's key figures. In 2005, Baer wrote about his work in his book, Videogames: The Beginning.
Baer died on Saturday, Dec. 6 at his New Hampshire home. It's a sad loss for the industry he helped create.
Baer's personal website contains a fascinating record of his extraordinary achievements.
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