Mathias Cena

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His name was not familiar to the general public, but millions of people enjoy every day of the descendants of his invention. Ralph Baer, ​​considered the father of video games, died Saturday at the age of 92, reports the website Gamasutra .

Born in 1922 in Germany, Rudolf Heinrich Baer fled the Nazis in 1938 and settled in the United States, where, after following a correspondence course, he repairs radios before being assigned to military intelligence and sent to Europe.

Back from the war, he later worked for a television manufacturer. In 1966, while employed by the company Sanders and Associates, which produces components for military surveillance devices, Ralph Baer had the idea of ​​a game on TV.

He says in an interview with Gamasutra in 2007 how, when he was head of a division of four to five hundred people, he began work on the project: “I . took two types, I put them on, no one needed to know “Then, after presenting his invention to his superiors skeptical, he dodges the questions:” Is it still you waste your time with this thing, Baer? “

100 million earned on trial

The” thing “becomes the Brown Box, a device connected to the TV where you plug two analog controllers. This is when it is marketed by Magnavox in 1972 under the name of the machine Odyssey Ralph Baer really comes into American homes, and incidentally, in history. 130,000 copies of the console, which is accompanied by plastic film to place on the screen to add decorations and display “color” sold the first year.

A few months later, Atari sells a competing product, which exceed the Odyssey in notoriety: Pong, a racket game that return a ball. Sanders and Magnavox accuse Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and creator of Pong, of plagiarizing their invention. They sue Atari, they win.

This is the beginning of a long series of legal actions that will bring more than $ 100 million, writes the New York Times . “Magnavox does not do video games but the trial,” declared Howard Lincoln in 1989, then Vice-President of the American branch of Nintendo. The company, like many others, lost in court against Magnavox.



photosensitive Gun

Another invention, prior to that of Ralph Baer, ​​is often cited as the real ancestor of video games: Tennis for Two , a game created on an oscilloscope by William A. Higinbotham in 1958. Baer, ​​who recognized the multiple origins of video games, said he had never seen Tennis for Two .

Ralph Baer, ​​who patented more than 150 inventions, is also the inventor of the light gun to shoot the screen, repeatedly reused on the various consoles produced thereafter, and Simon, the electronic board game in which the player presses in order on four colored buttons to reproduce a sequence of random sounds.

After his official retirement, Ralph Baer n has never really stopped working on its machines. In 2008, when he receives the Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award, he simply said: “I appreciate this honor, and I’m still tinkering stuff. Goodbye. “