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The Strong Museum Welcomes The Desk Of The 'Father Of Video Games' Ralph Baer
The Strong National Museum of Play in New York is welcoming a new edition to their eGameRevolution exhibit: the desk of video game pioneer Ralph Baer.
Baer invented the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, and adopted the affectionate nickname the '"father of video games" as a result. Sadly, he passed away at the age of 92 in 2014, and now admirers of his work can see where he crafted his inventions on his desk brought all the way from his Florida home. His desk includes many tools of his trade, including his soldering gun, oscilloscope, ohm meter, and drawers of electronic components.
His home console creation helped bring the possibly for interactive play into the domestic sphere, and set the foundation for all future consoles that proceeded it. He is also well known for many of his other electronic creations, the most popular being handheld memory Simon, which is still selling four decades later.
The Strong museum and Baer have worked together in the past. Baer provided the museum with thousands of personal papers and artifacts documenting his life's work, as well as a working reproduction of his prototype for the Magnavox Odyssey system for the same exhibit his desk now resides in, and Baer traveled to New York himself to celebrate its installation in 2010.
For more on Baer, you can check him out in a web series on contemporary inventors by filmmaker David Friedman, showing the gaming founding father working as hard as ever and inventing at the age of 90 in 2012
[Source: The Strong]
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