September 12th is National Video Games Day: Thanks, Ralph Baer!
Thursday, September 12th is National Videogames Day. In honor of that, it’s time for a confession… I recently realized that video games have woven a strong and persistent thread through my life, even though I no longer play them much. Years ago I dumped many quarters into arcade machines with names like Asteroids, Tempest, and Battlezone.
Until recently I thought I’d left those all far behind. Then I discovered an amazingly brilliant series on Netflix called Arcane, and learned that it is, in fact, based on a video game called League of Legends.
So even though I’ve never touched that game, I’m strongly impacted by it. In reality the video game industry has opened up enormous new avenues for creative storytelling, not unlike the movie industry a century earlier, and like that industry it pulls in a significant audience and the dollars they bring with them.
Also like that industry, it’s touched nearly all of us, even if indirectly.
Some of you will already know that one of the people responsible for the existence of this entire industry hails from right here in Manchester. OK, he wasn’t born here, but he made his home here, which is possibly more significant. Ralph Baer’s life was really quite remarkable.
Ralph was born in 1922 to Jewish parents living in Pirmasens, Germany, about 5 miles from the French border. In foreshadowing we rarely see in real life, this town was known for the manufacture of shoes. But this was long before Ralph had even heard of Manchester, NH. Much of Pirmasens had been destroyed in WWI, so when Ralph was 18 months old his family moved to Cologne, where, at age 14, he was expelled from school due to Nazi anti-Jewish legislation. His family, wisely fearing increasing persecution, moved to New York City in 1938, just two months prior to Kristallnacht.
Baer would eventually become a naturalized United States citizen. In a 2006 interview, Ralph said, “Most of the family on my father’s side did not make it. They all wound up in the concentration camps.” (Author’s note: Fifty years later I would tour the remains of a German concentration camp on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. We really are all connected.)
Once in the United States, Baer was able to leave behind much of his prior life. He was bright and easily found a factory job for 12 dollars per week. He was interested in electronics, and graduated from the National Radio Institute in 1940. In 1943, six years after arriving in the U.S., he was drafted into the army to fight in WWII and served in military intelligence at the U.S. Army HQ in London. Back in the U.S. in 1946, he used the GI Bill to get a B.Sci. degree in Television Engineering from the American Television Institute of Technology in 1949.
Baer then worked as an electrical engineer for a variety of companies, even starting his own, before landing at defense contractor Sanders Associates (now part of BAE Systems) in Nashua, NH, in 1956, where he stayed for 31 years until 1987. At Sanders Baer worked on a variety of military electronic systems, many of which used TV screens to display information. Many of Ralph’s gaming ideas were outgrowths of that work. Managers at Sanders supported his efforts which eventually resulted in U.S. Patent no. 3728480 owned jointly by Ralph Baer and BAE Systems. In 1971 Magnavox licensed Baer’s work to produce the Magnavox Odyssey home game system.
Today some of Baer’s hardware prototypes are in the Smithsonian Institution. Baer died at his home in Manchester on December 6, 2014. By then he held over 150 patents. He is memorialized with a statue and plaque along the river walk in Arms Park.
