MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – Imagine you were the first person to do something: the first to cure cancer, the first to walk on the moon, the first to eat spaghetti with your feet.

Now, imagine someone else getting credit for it.

For more than 30 years, that’s what 83-year-old Ralph Baer of Manchester had to live with. Whenever the topic of video games came up – and it did a lot for him – he had to listen to people talk about Pong, that simple Atari game from the 1970s.

Most people assumed it was the first home video game ever invented. They were wrong. Pong was based on a game Baer created in 1966.

Everyone from technology historians to the editors of several editions of encyclopedias got it wrong and proclaimed Pong’s creator, Nolan Bushnell, the “father of video games.”

But thanks to some hard lobbying from fans and the fast dissemination of information over the Internet, Baer has claimed his rightful place in technological histories and on the Web.

“I’m in the encyclopedia now,” he said, with unsmiling satisfaction. A retired engineer with Sanders Lockheed, Baer recently wrote a book about his creation of Brown Box, which Magnavox sold as the game Odyssey in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Called “Videogames: In the Beginning,” it chronicles everything from the concept – he thought people would enjoy interacting with their televisions – to the creation, to the numerous lawsuits filed against imitators for patent infringement.

It was soon after Odyssey came out that Atari developed Pong. Several other companies came out with games using a key piece of technology that Baer had patented.

But even after he won every infringement lawsuit, Baer was relegated to a secondary role in the history of video games.

Baer has several theories why Pong was largely credited as being the first game, even though it came out several years later.

One is Bushnell, Pong’s creator, who was media-savvy, according to Baer.

“Every chance he got, he’d put his mug in front of the cameras,” Baer said.

Also, Pong was the first arcade game, a freestanding, coin-operated machine, unlike Baer’s, which hooked up to a television.

Baer still has the original Odyssey unit, and it still works. It’s a small brown box – hence his name for it – hooked up to a television and two hand sets with control knobs.

The game is simple: There are two white squares on either side of the screen that act as paddles, hitting a third square back and forth. There are no sounds, no colors, no busty broads kicking butt. But it has the key elements of a video game: the need for good reflexes and the ability to do several things at once.

When it came out it in 1968, it created a sensation. Within two years, Magnavox sold close to a million units.

Baer got the idea for the game back in the 1950s, when he was an engineer building television sets for Loral, a corporation then based in New York City. One of his jobs was to test each set, which he did by turning knobs that would move a line back and forth across the screen.

Baer remembers thinking consumers might enjoy being able to play games with their TVs, and not just watch them. But when he mentioned the idea to his supervisor, he was told to get back to work.

Fast forward 15 years. Although Sanders Lockheed was a defense firm, Baer talked management into giving him a small staff to work on a concept for a game people could play with their TVs. They sold the idea to Magnavox. Baer continued to work on his own, designing games, many of which remain in their original boxes in his basement in Manchester.

There’s Simon, the game with flashing lights and sounds, Maniac, several electronic GI Joe dolls – and is that Teddy Ruxpin in the corner?

“No,” he says, irritated. “That’s TV Teddy. You put a video in, and he talks to his friends on the screen.”

Sorry.

Heralded by gaming magazines and Web sites as a genius, Baer finished high school by correspondence. He was forced to drop out at the age of 14, when his family lived in Cologne, Germany.

It was during Hitler’s rise to power, and Baer was Jewish. After he was forbidden to attend school, he went to work taking shorthand and typing letters for a wine importer.

When he was 16, his family managed to get visas to live in America. They left in 1938, only weeks before Kristallnacht, the infamous night when crowds burned and looted synagogues and businesses owned by Jews all over the country.

In New York, Baer went to work in a factory owned by a relative. He also taught himself English and began studying electronics by correspondence.

When he was drafted in 1943, he was assigned to a military intelligence unit, using his German to interrogate prisoners of war.

But Baer never got to see action. After being shipped off to England, he caught pneumonia. His unit was sent to Normandy for D-Day. He was sent to a military hospital.

“There’s no reason why I should be alive and those men shouldn’t,” Baer said. “I’m very lucky. Someone up there is looking out for me.”

Back in America, Baer wanted to go to college. But New York was “swarming” with young veterans who wanted to study on the GI Bill.

He found an unaccredited school in Chicago that would let him study television and radio engineering. After three years and a degree, it was back to New York to work for Loral.

Baer has written down his life story but hasn’t found a publisher. For now, he’s content to take the credit he’s long been owed as the father of home video games. His notes and sketches, as well as the original brown box unit, are being sent to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., to become part of its permanent collection.

He is already included in exhibits at science museums in Tokyo, Berlin and Chicago. And he has a long list of e-mails from gaming enthusiasts who just wanted to write and say hi. And thanks.