UPDATE, 12/7/2014, 5:25p CT: News broke this afternoon that inventor and gaming pioneer Ralph Baer passed away at the age of 92. In light of this, we've dusted off this profile on Baer's life and career from our archives. It originally ran on July 13, 2013.

Even if you're a devoted fan of video games, there's a decent chance you're not familiar with the name Ralph H. Baer. This should be considered gamer high treason considering Baer's importance in creating the concept of home video games and the vast, varied entertainment ecosystem now built upon them. Despite being the one to push the dominoes toward an industry that currently makes billions of dollars annually, the bulk of the gaming community has largely forgotten about him.

Now a 91-year-old widower, the German-born Baer is the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the world’s first video game console. The Odyssey is predated in the games-on-screens space only by experiments like Willy Higinbotham's Tennis for Two and the coin-op dud Computer Space. But Baer also has a long and distinguished record as an engineer and inventor. The list of patents and gadgets in his name encompasses surgical-cutting equipment, “muscle-toning pulse generators,” submarine-tracking radar systems, video simulations for trainee pilots, talking books and talking doormats, iconic ‘80s toys like SIMON and Laser Command, and even launch displays and a lunar-resistant camera grip for the Saturn V and Apollo 11 space programs.

Invention, he told Ars during a recent interview, is as natural to him as breathing.

Still, by his own admittance, his greatest creation is the video game console. There’s no question that Baer is extremely proud of that invention's lineage. When asked if he feels directly responsible for modern consoles like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, his answer is clear-cut. “Totally.”

Ralph H. Baer: Origins

Baer was born in the Rhineland in 1922 into a fallen German Empire crippled by unprecedented debt and stricken by national shame and misery following a catastrophic defeat in the First World War. This wretched interbellum period witnessed the rise of the charismatic Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, and it was his violent and exclusionary anti-Semitic policies that drove Baer and his family first to the Netherlands and eventually to the United States in 1938.

As a young man, the immigrant Baer showed a flair for engineering and invention. In 1940, after a correspondence course at the National Radio Institute in Washington DC, he graduated as a radio technician. Then war came. Baer was drafted into the US Army in 1943 as a Private, where he served in Military Intelligence under Eisenhower. His degree and his natural affinity for machinery saw him writing invaluable training documents for Allied soldiers preparing for D-Day. Two years after his return from Europe in 1946, the 23-year-old began studying for the world’s first Bachelor of Science in Television Engineering at the American Television Institute in Chicago (founded by the inventor of the mechanical television, Ulises Armand Sanabria). Keep in mind that this was at a time when there were only a few thousand TV sets in the entire country.

Baer commenced his career servicing and repairing television and radio sets out of a small shop in New York, and he later worked with several electronics firms. It was in 1955, while working for Loral Electronics Corporation, that Baer recalls being tasked with “building the best television set ever.” Not perturbed in the slightest by this monumental challenge, he had a novel thought that would ultimately change the face of the entertainment industry forever: “TV gaming.” This, Baer tells me, was his “epiphany.”

Unfortunately, as Baer recalls, “management said no.” Loral considered the idea of games on TV a little too outlandish and a little too expensive at the time. Already behind schedule, the company pushed forward with plans for a TV set without games. For 11 years, Baer’s idea hibernated, biding its time for the right moment.

Let’s play television games!

With the rise of color television and low-cost electronic components, TV gaming was more feasible than ever by 1966. Now chief engineer for equipment design at Sanders Associates (a defense contractor), Baer remembers hastily writing down his ideas on a notepad as he waited at a New York bus terminal. What resulted was a four-page document for a TV “game box," playable on channels 3 or 4 (channel “LP”—“Let’s Play”—as he dubbed it). Baer set down plans for action and sports games (“in which skill of manual dexterity or observation is to play a part”), as well as playing card and instructional games, the latter designed to “teach the basics of geometry and basic arithmetic.”

The game box was intended to have universal appeal, bringing the family unit closer together and creating interactive entertainment around a traditionally passive device. The more than 40 million television sets in the United States at the time were “literally begging to be used” for more than just the 6pm news, as Baer puts it.

From September 1966 to February 1967, Baer and fellow engineer Bob Tremblay designed a proof-of-concept device which allowed the user to move a white dot around the screen and change its size. Confident in this idea, Baer pitched Chase—a two-player game where the objective was to tail and chase the opposing player’s white dot—to Herb Campman, Sanders’ Corporate Director. Intrigued but reserved, Campman approved $2,500 of funding for the project (worth about $17,000 today) on the condition that it “do more interesting things,” Baer said.

Fully financed, Baer and Tremblay, and two more engineers, Bob Rusch and Bill Harrison, began work on a number of prototype “TV Game Units.” By 1968, a seventh iteration, “The Brown Box” (so-called because of the fashionable wood grain adhesive on the device’s cover) was finished, complete with circuitry for color output and a number of built-in games, including variations of Chase, Handball, Golf, and Ping Pong (later renamed Table Tennis). Players controlled the action via two large paddle controls with rotary dials and switches. A basic light gun peripheral—which, Baer reminded me, was another invention of his—was also produced for simple target-shooting games.

The next step for Baer and Nutting was licensing the Brown Box to a manufacturer. While many companies were impressed with the novel technologies and ideas Baer employed, the likes of General Electronics and Motorola were not willing to take the risk or couldn't envisage the target market. It was an enthusiastic VP of marketing at Magnavox, Gerry Martin, who first understood the machine’s potential, but it took Martin until 1971 to convince a boardroom of corporate managers that TV games were the next big thing. Martin’s persistence, backed by a solid product, paid off when the Magnavox suits agreed to move forward with the production of the Odyssey model 1TL200.

Compromise was necessary even at this early stage, however. The Brown Box’s color circuitry was thrown out to lower costs, replaced with cheap plastic overlays that were attached to the player’s TV screen. In addition, the 16 switches used to alternate games were replaced with smaller circuit boards that plugged into the main motherboard. While these “jumpers” resembled the cartridges that would hold game data in later consoles, they contained no internal circuitry and simply connected the internal circuits in the Odyssey together in such a way that different built-in games could be played.

The Odyssey was basic even for the time. It was battery-powered and couldn't output sound. The simple white dots it displayed required a lot of imagination to create believable scenes, even with the colorful screen overlays. The console lacked a built-in scoring system, so points and records in Table Tennis and Football were noted on themed, printed score sheets. Roulette and Simon Says used physical cards, paper notes, and dice. In a sense, many of the Odyssey’s games were board games with a bizarre (but exciting) TV element.

Unsurprisingly, the Odyssey garnered immediate attention at trade shows and press events. The idea of a television viewer controlling an object on a screen was practically inconceivable at the time. Dealers and journalists were left scrambling to lift their jaws from the floor, and the electronics media was abuzz with talk of Magnavox’s revolutionary “mystery product.” It was a massive, unprecedented step forward for entertainment.