Ralph Baer, a German immigrant and video game developer principally credited as "The Father of Video Games" due to various contributions to the industry in the latter half of the 20th century, has died at the age of 92 at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire, according to a report from Gamasutra.

Prior to his days crafting pre-digital fantasy worlds as a nationalized U.S. citizen, Baer, who was born into a Jewish family based in Germany, was expelled from school because of his ancestry and forced to attend an all-Jewish school. Fearing the snowballing persecution to come, his family fled to New York City in 1938, just two months prior to the attacks on Kristallnacht, according to Kotaku.

Eventually, Baer pursued a career in electronics. This led to the development and patenting of several hardware prototypes and, ultimately, in the 1960s, the invention of the first home video game console, simply called the "Brown Box." It was later known as the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 upon licensing out the design.

The New York Times recalls that Baer got the idea that would revolutionize the video game industry and single-handedly signal the tech boom to follow at the tail-end of the summer of 1966, when he was "sitting on a step outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan waiting for a colleague." The result was "adetailed four-page outline for a 'game box' that would allow people to play board, action, sports and other games on almost any American television set."

"An intrigued boss gave him $2,000 for research and $500 for materials and assigned two men to work with him," Baer's obituary in The New York Times reads.

It developed into a lifelong passion for Baer and the two others.

According to The New York Times, Sanders Associates licensed its system to Magnavox, which began selling it as Odyssey in the summer of 1972 as the first home video game console. It sold 130,000 units in its first year.

Two years later, Baer and Sanders sued Atari for infringing on their patent and Atari eventually settled, paying $700,000. This would be the first of many lawsuits for Baer, who sued a couple of dozen companies and earning more than $100 million in capital.

"Magnavox isn't in the business of making video games," stated Howard Lincoln, Nintendo's former vice president and senior counsel, in an 1989 interview with Newsday, "They're just in the business of suing people."

After creating the device, Baer was also a co-inventor of the electronic game "Simon," which is still available today.

For his life's work, President George W. Bush awarded Baer the National Medal of Technolog for "his groundbreaking and pioneering creation, development and commercialization of interactive video games, which spawned related uses, applications, and mega-industries in both the entertainment and education realms" in 2004, alongside Roger L. Easton and companies IBM and Motorola, Inc.

Bear also received the Pioneer Award during the Game Developers' Choice Awards in 2008.

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