I had planned to write up a post about the new wallpaper, and what it actually is, however I learned yesterday of the terribly sad news that industry veteran Ralph Baer, inventor of the very first videogame console, colloquially known as the ‘Brown Box,’ has passed away at 92.

His importance to the field of technology in general, not just the game industry, can’t be overstated. An electrical engineer whose family fled to Holland from Germany to escape the Nazis – something my own grandfather had to do – then relocated to the United States, he developed a prototype console that could control a “ball,” really nothing more than a square of light, on a television set.

He, or rather Sanders, the defense contractor he then worked for, licensed the technology to Magnavox, they marketed the resulting console as the Odyssey, and the videogame industry was born; it remains a powerhouse even today. If you want to see how we played TV games back in the 70s, you can play all the Odyssey2 (the Odyssey’s follow-up console) games that were ever made over at the Internet Archive.

The Original Magnavox Odyssey

In case you think games are something just for kids, you should be aware that the average age of a ‘gamer’ is 31, and I took a few other statistics from the Entertainment Software Association‘s website to show how important that Brown Box was:

• From 2009 to 2012, the U.S. video game industry increased in size by more than 9 percent – four times the growth rate of the U.S. economy during the same period.
• In 2012, the entertainment software industry added over $6.2 billion to U.S. Gross Domestic Product.
• The computer and video game industry directly and indirectly employs more than 146,000 people.
• The average salary for direct employees is $94,747, resulting in total national compensation of $4 billion.
• Direct employment for the industry grew at an annual rate more than 13 times the growth of the overall U.S. labor market (9 percent vs. 0.72 percent) between 2009 and 2012.

It is one of the main drivers of technological development and advancement, along with military research, and is somewhere around a $67 billion-a-year industry, expected to grow to $87 billion by 2017, and for years revenues have crushed those of professional sports and even blockbuster Hollywood releases. After all, we didn’t develop z-culling, Distance Field Ambient Occlusion, MIP mapping, AI pathfinding algorithms, multi-core processors that are now in phones solely for gaming, and PCIex16 along with a slew of other technologies so PowerPoint presentations look good, we did it so when you are fending off martians who are trying to enslave humanity, it looks, sounds, and behaves like you are fending off martians.

And we have Ralph Baer to thank for all of it. He is in the National Inventors Hall of Fame, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2006, his original units and accompanying documentation are in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, he was awarded the industry’s Pioneer Award at the 8th annual Game Developer’s Conference, he held over 150 patents, his accomplishments just go on and on. Oh, and he developed the memory game Simon.

Remember this guy?

On a personal note, I’m a member of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and although anyone can vote, as a member I was always sent a request for whatever year it was on who should be honored with the museum’s Fellow Award, and every year I petitioned for Ralph Baer. For whatever reason they never chose him, which I always felt was a real injustice. Perhaps it will take this terminal event to finally give them second thoughts.

Let’s all take a moment and play a game of PONG in his honor.