Die Ralph Baer, ​​father of videogames – Digital Journal Juárez

Rosa Jiménez Country | Monday December 8, 2014 | 22:28 hrs

San Francisco invented the “brown box” as it is informally called Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console that was released in 1972. This Saturday, Ralph Baer (Rodalben, Germany, 1922) died at his home in Manchester (New Hampshire, USA) at 92 years. Jewish, he fled with his family from Nazi Germany to the United States in the fall of 1938, and was the first to turn television into a center of interactive entertainment.

Baer became interested in electronic engineering during adolescence and spent the early years of his career developing medical equipment, speakers and other technological systems for commercial and military purposes.

After graduating as a radio technician in 1940, in 1943 he was called up. At the end of the war, back to civilian life, he began working at a nascent technology industry Sanders Associates.

In 1966 showed the first prototype of the Brown Box. Not convinced them of the potential of the invention and changed the company.

Baer consider an incipient park of 40 million television represented an interesting market for your idea.

In 1972 Magnavox, its new employer, licensed the first video game console. It had nothing to do with what is now understood as such. It was a rugged device with a slot for cards where the games were kept. This model came to have a catalog of 27 titles. The console, priced at $ 100, sold more than 100,000 units.

Magnavox hegemony lasted only five years until 2600 Atari released her.

One of the most successful games was a tennis simulation, a prototype of the legendary Atari Pong worked in whose development Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

A Baer is considered the precursor of sports-themed games with an archaic football, ice hockey supposedly, and the aforementioned handball court. The differences between sports or mechanics demanded certain abstraction, since the console was in black and white, the slow progress and the size of the significant pixels.

In his curiosity to explore new forms of digital interaction created also the first simulator game. Odyssey had a light gun that created the illusion of hunting ducks on TV. Ten years later the Sega Master System models and Nintendo Famicom relanzaban this idea.