Pioneer of home video game console Ralph Henry Baer died

The pioneer of home video game console Ralph Henry Baer died on 6 December 2014 in Manchester following a brief illness. He was 92.

He was famously known as the Father of Video Games due to his contributions to video game industry.

Ralph Henry Baer
• Born to a Jewish family in south-western Germany in 1922, Baer and his family fled the country in 1938 to escape the Holocaust.
• In the late 1960s, Baer developed a system known as the Brown Box while working for Sanders Associates, a New Hampshire-based defence contractor. Later, Brown Box was named as Magnavox Odyssey.
• A version of Baer's Brown Box is now at the American History Museum at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C.
• In 1967, he designed the game Chase, the first game played in a television set.
• Baer is credited for creating the first light gun for video game console. He is the co-creator of the light-up memory games Simon and Super Simon.
• Baer received the National Medal of Technology from President George W Bush in 2006 and in 2008, he received the Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award.
• In 2010, Ralph Henry Baer was inducted into the United States National Inventors Hall of Fame.
• In 2005, he donated all original videogame units and documents to the Smithsonian Institution.