Army officer who invented video games

By Kenneth Kwama

The first person to create a video game system for the television was an engineer who loved watching movies, but was disappointed the outcome of his favourite pastime - movie battles, did not always reflect what he wished for.

He was agitated when bullets missed their targets in close combat situations and for this reason, the inventor of video games — Ralph Baer embarked on a mission to create what would give power to television viewers to control the outcome of what they were watching.

Roughly, this is how the German engineer, who was born in 1922 in Germany, conceived the idea of creating the first video game.

US emigrant

Ralph Baer busy in his lab in New Hampshire decades after inventing the first home video game. [photo: COURTESY]

The inventions were made in the US where Ralph, his parents, and his sister had emigrated to in 1938, a year or so before Adolf Hitler began taking over Germany.

"For a couple of years, he ran radio stores in New York City that repaired all kinds of radios. In 1943, he served in the US army. When he came back from the army, he attended a college and graduated with a degree in Television Engineering. This was the first time that this degree was given," states an article posted on www.highbeam.com.

Ralph who is now 88 still keeps busy in his lab in New Hampshire, decades after inventing the first home video game console and other popular electronics such as the Simon.

"He’s known by many as the father of home video games, because in 1966, he conceived of the first home gaming set-up, prototyped it throughout the late 60s as it evolved into the ‘Brown Box’ and then, in the early 70s, as the Odyssey video game console from Magnavox," states www.kotaku.com.

Both the Brown Box and the Odyssey included one of Ralph’s key video game inventions — a light gun. What most video game enthusiasts don’t know is that the man, who made it possible for them to shoot light guns and virtual guns in their video games, was an authority on guns.

According to www.kotaku.com, Ralph’s knowledge of guns preceded his invention of home video games by a couple of decades.

Ralph served in the US army’s military intelligence in the mid-1940s. He was part of a group of German and Italian-speaking army officials who taught a quarter of a million US soldiers how to handle Axis weapons.

enemy armament

In the course of teaching soldiers about weapons, Ralph said, his group began acquiring them. He found himself in charge of a weapons museum in Tidworth, south England that was full of enemy armament.

According to various web sources, the museum had a German 88 — a massive piece of artillery, a half-truck, anti-aircraft guns, and machine guns. The 88 came from the Spanish civil war.

Other weapons came from the North African campaign. Some came from the British, from what they had acquired.

"I got more and more familiar with weapons, Baer is quoted saying on www.kotaku.com.

"Since I could read German,I could read some French and I could read a smattering of technical Italian and Spanish. I became a self-taught expert in foreign weapons."

Guns became his passion because he knew so much about them. By the time he was leaving Europe, Ralph could have taken any of the several hundred hand guns, machine guns, submachine guns or rifles and told anyone what they were.

illustration

He could draw extensive diagrams showing the relationship between, say a Russian submachine gun and a Czech submachine gun.

Ralph returned to America in January 1946 and set up a museum of weapons in Fort Riley, Kansas. He also wrote a book about the history of machine guns.

Despite his army experience, Ralph told the website that any connection someone might draw between his expertise with guns and his creation of the first gun controller for the first video game console would be "pretty tenuous."

By 1949, he had left the army and became an engineer. He spent the next two decades working on everything from surgical equipment to radar.

"It wasn’t the gun-expert part of Ralph that ensured a gun would be a part of the world’s first video game console. It was Ralph’s nature as an engineer," states the website.

The early game consoles Ralph and his technicians were making in early 1966 and 67 involved simple experiences that lent themselves to simple types of games.

"Think about it in these terms," he told www.kotaku.com. "We’ve got a spot on the screen. We can move it around. That’s kind of fun. We put an overlay on the screen and now I can play some sort of single-sprite elementary game," he said.

The shooting was fun though Ralph later commented in newspaper interviews that the depth of shooting possible in that early technology limited the joy of those first light gun experiments.

"We didn’t have the scenario you have today where you have interactive targets running around all over the place, which is very different," he said.

The spot on Ralph’s screen originally stayed still, and, because of that, other non-shooter experiences proved to be better during earlier games.

"By the time we were playing ping-pong and handball and volleyball video games, I thought it was a lot more fun than shooting the targets," said Ralph. 

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