[NEWS] "The Father of Video Games" passes away at age 92

Ralph Baer, credited by many as the "Father of Video Games", passed away on the 6th of December 2014, at age 92. Born in Germany in 1922, Baer moved to the United States from his Nazi-occupied homeland in 1938 at the age of 16. There, he signed up for a correspondence and radio course. After he graduated, he made his living fixing broken transistors and replacing antennas.

Eventually he was drafted by the army, where he served in the Military's Intelligence Unit and was awarded the Marksman's Medal. After returning he earned a Television Engineering degree from the American Television Institute of Technology.

Roughly a decade later, he created the "Brown Box". According to Baer, the idea came to him simply by looking at the TV set and thinking "what can I do with this". He licensed the Brown Box to Magnavox in 1971 and in 1972 it was repackaged and sold as the "Magnavox Odyssey". Later, his work would be challenged by the other "father of videogames", Atari's Nolan Bushnell and would go on to help both Magnavox and Coleco to produce competing system's to the Atari 2600. Baer was also the first to create a "light-gun" for the home consoles.

He remained interested in the technology of videogames after the industry recovered from the 1983 crash, even inventing a motion control device for the NES, which Nintendo eventually rejected. Baer had gone on record rejecting the notion of violent video games, saying "What I created got abominated". He was awarded in 2006 the National Medal of Technology by former U.S. President George W. Bush.

In his later years he invented mostly for himself and was content with making toy and miniaturized technology for the sake of research and invention. 

Ralph Baer was a widower, but is survived by three children and four grandchildren. His work remains preserved in the Smithsonian Institute, where he donated his hardware prototypes and documents in 2006, as well as in the very existence of video game technology and culture that thrives in our time.

Source: Gamefront.com