A biography for Ralph H. Baerhasn’t been written yet.
“An entire generation of talented people - engineers, artists, scriptwriters, musicians, programmers - have been busy creating a whole new art form for us. The name of this new game is interactivity.”
“Never let an engineer try to sell his stuff. It rarely works unless you are Akio Morita.”
“There's no way anybody could have predicted how fast this industry would take off.”
“When technology is ready for something novel, when the components needed to build something new become affordable, it is going to be done by someone and more likely by several people.”
“Pong can clearly be credited with having starting the coin-operated arcade videogame industry with a bang!”
“All my friends, they're all gone. I've outlived them all.”
“By and large, I'm in the same boat as other inventors. If we're lucky, of the 10 or 15 items we do a year, maybe one or two of them wind up with a licensing agreement.”
“When you get to be over 80, your coordination goes to hell and a half.”
“There's nothing in the Bible that says, 'You must play video games.'”
“In 1966, thoughts about playing games using an ordinary TV set began to percolate in my mind.”
“Perhaps at some time in the future, when you ask a friend to come up and look at your etchings, you will plug in your collection of video art.”
“It's like I'm basically an artist. I'm no different from a painter who sits there and loves what he does.”
“The talent curve in game-making is going straight up to Heaven.”
“I had the misfortune of being born in a horrendous situation.”
“Coming up with ideas isn't hard. The real challenge is finding the time to actually build something and then finding a home for it.”
“When you built television sets, you have all this test equipment. And you'd have all these lines and squares on the screen to test it. So it occurred to me that it might be fun for people to control the lines and squares on the screen.”
“'Pong' is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game.”
“If I learned anything from the Army, it was about being able to get things done, no matter how tough the assignment, and it served me later in life.”
“Coming up with novel ideas and converting them into real products has always been as natural as breathing for me.”
“Three cheers for the artistry of the lone designer doing his thing!”