Ralph Baer: Recovering the History of the Video Games

Ralph Baer the "father of video games" created the first light gun and game for home television use, sold grouped with a game expansion pack for the Odyssey, and collectively known as the Shooting Gallery. The light gun itself was the first peripheral for a video game console. 1966 he began to transform people's relationship to home television by inventing a way to interact with TV sets. Later Nolan Bushnell played Odyssey at a trade show and went on to found Atari and create the arcade version of Baer's Ping-Pong game, the now infamous Pong. Baer's groundbreaking work has shaped the leisure-time activities of a large segment of the world's population and spawned numerous businesses. But the historical record of his achievements very nearly disappeared. He recently told us the story of how his original documents and apparatus were lost ... and then found. They are now preserved in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.