The Godfather of Games

The paneled basement of Ralph Baer’s postwar ranch home in Manchester, New Hampshire, looks like a lot of other basements from that period: burnt-orange carpet, outmoded electronics, an ancient exercise bike stashed in the corner. All over the country, kids sprawl on couches and play video games in rooms just like this. But this one is different in one respect: There’s history here. When representatives from the Smithsonian Institution first came to his home in 2002, says the 84-year-old engineer, they were “drooling.” That’s because this gruff widower in large eyeglasses, a heavy cardigan, and black slippers is the founding father of what has become a $27 billion entertainment industry.

In a small room near his workshop, Baer, like a modern-day Wizard of Oz, slides open a plastic curtain to reveal his prototypes for the world’s first video games. There are brown metal boxes that gamers would recognize as primitive joysticks. Old toy rifles are fitted with connector cables. There’s an original 1972 Odyssey console from Magnavox, the first commercial product based on Baer’s design for a now-ubiquitous pastime – games played on your TV screen.

Until recently, Baer’s work with games during the 1960s, while he was a division manager at the defense contractor Sanders Associates, was largely overlooked by the general public. Now, however, his legacy is clear. The Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention & Innovation recently published a huge online archive of Baer’s papers; the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, has his “brown box” and other early models on permanent display. The director of the American Computer Museum, in Bozeman, Montana, is planning to ship the entire contents of Baer’s workshop to the museum’s gallery, where it will be preserved.

“My history is in place,” says Baer, who fought for years on behalf of Sanders and Magnavox against various patent infringements of his archetypal ping-pong video game, a precursor to Atari’s Pong. Although Nolan Bushnell – the “cult figure,” in Baer’s words, behind the early game maker Atari – has sometimes been called the “father of the video game,” Baer is now widely recognized as the rightful pioneer. There were video games before Baer’s, including a simple computer game called “Tennis for Two,” developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1950s. But computers then were huge, institutionalized machines. Baer’s innovation was to bring video games to the home, to be played on the most beloved of appliances: our TVs. “He was right there on the ground floor,” says Art Molella, director of the Lemelson Center. “He was one of the first to realize these cathode ray screens could be interactive.”

Baer’s was an inauspicious beginning. After fleeing Nazi Germany with his parents and sister in the 1930s, he toiled as a teenager in a New York factory that produced leather accessories such as nail-file cases. Riding the subway one day, he noticed a magazine ad promising “big money in radio” through a correspondence course. “I said sayonara to the factory,” he says. Schematics came naturally to him. “I memorized the entire handbook of vacuum tubes,” he recalls. After serving in World War II in military intelligence, he studied at the American Television Institute of Technology in Chicago. A series of jobs and ventures in the military electronics industry eventually led him to New Hampshire and Sanders, where he was the chief engineer for equipment design, working with Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch.

In the late 1960s, the three men created game after game on their transistor-circuit boxes, including “chase” games, target practice, and the real breakthrough: two-player ping-pong. Their creations weren’t intended to sharpen or simulate any type of military training; Baer and his colleagues simply had the freedom and resources to pursue their ideas. Baer’s superiors at Sanders were initially skeptical of the games, but by the early 1970s, their licensing deal with Magnavox would be seen as a welcome windfall.

The Odyssey, the first commercial video gaming system, was only a modest success. Meanwhile, Pong, originally an arcade game, became the first home video game phenomenon. By then, Baer was working part time as a consultant and set about inventing electronic toys. One of his first was Simon, a light-and-sound memory game from 1978 that’s still sold today.

For a man who had little more than the German equivalent of an Erector set as a child, Baer made an unlikely playmaker of the toy industry. Arranged on shelves in his basement are slightly dusty examples of the many diversions he has invented, from a talking bike speedometer to 1987’s Smarty Bear Video, a stuffed teddy that could interact with its friends in an accompanying videocassette. Yet he’s not much of a kid at heart. “I’m lousy at playing games,” he says.

For Baer, the fun was always in the problem solving. A year ago, he was recognized for his work at a White House ceremony, where President Bush presented him with a National Medal of Technology, alongside Star Wars creator George Lucas. Accompanying him were his sons James and Mark, daughter Nancy, their spouses, and Baer’s four grandchildren. Baer’s wife of more than 50 years, Dena, had passed away just days before. “She died on February 10th, and on the 13th I was at the White House with the president hanging the damn medal on my neck,” he says. “It was a tough time.”

He is grateful for the belated recognition. All of the archivists he’s been working with are ideal custodians for his legacy, he says. And with the Smithsonian Institution undergoing a major renovation of its National Museum of American History, the Lemelson Center has plans to create an exhibit commemorating the inventor’s work. “I’m in the right place at the right time,” says Baer, who still works as a consultant. “I’ve been lucky all my life. This is the last example.”

James Sullivan is a freelance writer in Amesbury. E-mail him at jassullivan@earthlink.net.