Man Who Invented Video GamesJoin now to read essay Man Who Invented Video GamesThe man who invented video games is Ralph H. Baer. Ralph Baer was born in 1922 southwest Germany. In 1938 he left Germany for U.S. with his family. In 1940 he graduated at National Radio Institute as a radio service technician. In the 1940’s he ran three radio service stores in NY City, he serviced all types of home and auto radios, early FM radios and TV Sets and built PA systems. In the late 1940’s he joined the army. In 1950 he became the chief (and only) engineer at Wappler, Inc, a small electro medical equipment firm in NY City. He designed and built surgical cutting machines, epilators, and muscle-toning low-frequency pulse generating equipment.
In 1967, Ralph Baer wrote the first video game played on a television set. The first game he made was called “chase.” Ralph Baer first conceived his idea in 1951 while working for Loral, which was a television company. Nothing even similar to Video Games happened for at least another fifteen years.
In the summer of 1966 Ralph Baer was waiting for another sanders engineer at a bus terminal. During his free time he took notes on using an ordinary home television for the use of playing games.
On September first 1966 he turned his notes into a four-page document that listed types of games that he thought of. He said they can be played on either channel three or four, the channels he called the “Lets Play” channels.
In December 1966 decided he should demonstrate his video game idea to Herbert Campman, (the company’s Corporate Director and most likely source of funding.) He showed Campman a demo. Campman thought it had potential. But he said that it had better do more interesting things than what was on the chase demo. Which was no more the two squares chasing one another.
On December 12th Ralph sent Campman a memo requesting some money to carry on the work. The first official funding was $2000 for direct labor and $500 for direct materials. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to keep the project going. In early February, Ralph figured it was time to get serious and sketched out some preliminary designs of a transistorized version of a basic TV game unit. On the 12th of February, he brought Bill Harrison, another technician on-board the TV game project. Having worked with Bill Harrison on another project, a military crash program, Ralph really liked Harrisons talents, so he commandeered him, and put him to working that small 10x20ft room of the 5th floor, where the first vacuum tube prototype had
The Model T is probably the very first television game. The first game that came to light in the 1950s was the StarWars: The Clone Wars project at the Commodore’s, which was run by Ralph McPherson. At 9:30 am in February of the following year, in the lobby of a Commodore building at 17th Street, McPherson had started building a miniature version of Captain Vickers’s “Boltzmann’s” model of the same game. In the spring of 1948, at 11:00 pm, McPherson sent him that model of a game game machine that he had created, but not the exact same as the one that McPherson had in mind. At a conference in March of that year, McPherson told his team he had a prototype of a game machine that he’d built, but his version had not been finished.
McPherson decided to test an idea. The first attempt he made was a game machine with a single-axis view view of a picture with a screen. This idea is referred to in more modern usage as a “display device”. All of a sudden, the picture that McPherson had designed with his prototype game was going to look much prettier, and this concept caused problems for McPherson. That same day, on April 7th, the computer on display in front of him saw three new lines on its screen. Some time later, it became obvious the picture was what McPherson had designed with four different screens. They would look similar in size and brightness. The problem soon became apparent, and McPherson decided to make the game more or less “display. It was the same problem with three different screens. McPherson wanted the game to look like four different screens, and he needed two or three of them to do it properly. And, of course, McPherson didn’t have the money to build a simple toy, because he had no experience with toy production. This was probably the beginning of the end for McPherson’s idea. It was also the beginning of The Boy Who Cried “My Fiancee”.
The first game
Early on, when Ralph was at a meeting of engineers (who were working by the way the project progressed), they were trying to put together a prototype for a new project. Ralph wrote this idea on his lunch break, and then told the team that his plans would be for five simple things to set the tone throughout the project. These were simple things: first, the game would go up in price. Then, after his two big ideas, he would propose to build a computer-based television that would record, and then, later, use teleconferencing. The game would go up in price each