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Let's Play

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Ralph Baer, the man who created the first ever home games console, has passed away, aged 92. Referred to as the ‘father of videogames’, Baer helped to design the Magnavox Odyssey, which, even if you’ve never heard of it, probably had a colossal influence on the games industry as a whole. It’s really hard to guess what he has influenced directly, but contributing to the first ever commercial console is an achievement not many can boast.

The Magnavox Odyssey actually released back in August 1972 in the US, and beat Atari’s Pong arcade cabinet by just a few months. Unlike arcade cabinets of that time, though, the console Baer worked on introduced the concept of playing games on your own television. It all started when he was working as a defence contractor, and he and two colleagues - William Harrison and William Rusch – started working on a device called the ‘Brown Box’, that could run interactive games that were printed on circuit boards, back in 1966.

The Brown Box was then licensed to an electronics company called Magnavox, which released the Odyssey in 1972. It played 12 separate games, including a super pixelated version of Table Tennis, and sold 100,000 units in its first year. Of course, Atari and Nintendo followed, but they actually had difficulties designing their consoles because of things that Magnavox had patented. Baer himself said:

“By the mid-1970s, integrated circuits and single-chip game designs were coming into use, reducing the cost and increasing the performance of games so that the industry took off like a big bird. Not too shabby for an idea that took off from a few notes scribbled in New York in August of 1966.”

Not too shabby indeed. Ralph Baer, we thank you for your enormous contributions to the games industry as we know it.