Ralph Baer, the developer of Magnavox Odyssey, the very first video game console, died on 7 December, at the age of 92. Baer, the recipient of numerous awards and a member of the National Inventors of Fame, was awarded the National Medal of Technology from George W. Bush in 2006 for his outstanding engineering achievements.

His famous device was launched in the market in August 1972. Magnavox Odyssey laid the foundations for a number of rules, still in use today, for game consoles; hardware that ran the games was placed in a purpose-designed box, images were not displayed on a monitor, but the device had to be connected to a television screen, and controllers had to be used to play games.

Baer moved from Germany to the United States and developed the console, initially called the Brown Box, already in the late 1960s.

The very first purpose-built hardware or video game peripheral, the light gun of the shooting game called the Shooting Gallery was also developed for Odyssey. The light gun was designed to detect light coming from the television screen but pointing it at a light bulb in a lamp nearby also registered a hit. Thus the first cheating tricks are also linked to Baer’s device.

Later on Baer came to design the pattern-matching electronic game called Simon, which is still in use today.