Ralph Baer died last Saturday. With his passing, the art and science of video games loses a founding father. His contributions to gaming, entertainment, and technology were incomparable.
An electrical engineer by trade, Baer's innovative genius led him to seek out new applications for existing technologies. He looked at the television, a device created for the passive act of watching broadcast programming, and imagined a more interactive purpose. He believed that by taking direct control of the light-generating hardware in a TV set and combining it with logical electronic processing, it might be possible to make a video game.
