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The Most Famous

GAME DESIGNERS from Germany

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This page contains a list of the greatest German Game Designers. The pantheon dataset contains 56 Game Designers, 1 of which were born in Germany. This makes Germany the birth place of the 7th most number of Game Designers behind United Kingdom and France.

Top 1

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary German Game Designers of all time. This list of famous German Game Designers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Ralph H. Baer

1. Ralph H. Baer (1922 - 2014)

With an HPI of 59.31, Ralph H. Baer is the most famous German Game Designer.  His biography has been translated into 38 different languages on wikipedia.

Ralph Henry Baer (born Rudolf Heinrich Baer; March 8, 1922 – December 6, 2014) was a German-American inventor, game developer, and engineer. Baer's family fled Germany just before World War II and Baer served the American war effort, gaining an interest in electronics shortly thereafter. Through several jobs in the electronics industry, he was working as an engineer at Sanders Associates (now BAE Systems) in Nashua, New Hampshire, when he conceived the idea of playing games on a television screen around 1966. With support of his employers, he worked through several prototypes until he arrived at a "Brown Box" that would later become the blueprint for the first home video game console, licensed by Magnavox as the Magnavox Odyssey. Baer continued to design several other consoles and computer game units, including contributing to design of the Simon electronic game. Baer continued to work in electronics until his death in 2014, with over 150 patents to his name. Baer is considered "the Father of Video Games" due to his many contributions to games and helping to spark the video game industry in the latter half of the 20th century. In February 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology 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".

Pantheon has 1 people classified as game designers born between 1922 and 1922. Of these 1, none of them are still alive today. The most famous deceased game designers include Ralph H. Baer.

Deceased Game Designers

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