Gamasutra recently chatted with Ralph Baer, most commonly known as the father of video games. They spoke on a wide variety of subjects, from Baer's immigration to the United States in August 1938 to Japan's role in the industry, which he states is deserved "because they put the time, the energy, the effort, the ingenuity, the creativity into it."

Of particular note is Baer's recollection of the legal battles of the 1980s that defined the turbulent era in gaming, one of which challenged his role in the creation of video games.

Meanwhile, they [Nintendo] built games that infringed, so we [Sanders Associates] went after them. Eventually, they started to settle, then didn't; decided to sue us. [They] got that sharp law firm in New York to sue us for misinforming the patent office, which is a Federal offence.
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That's when they used Higinbotham as a witness [to try and invalidate our patents]. What did Higinbotham do? He put a creative little game on an oscilloscope. Any number of engineers did that before him and after him, including me. And it was just something that's natural, ya know.
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So he had all the tools, he had the scope, and what he did was very interesting and was ingeniously designed, and it was a lot of fun. So, did he think of making a product out of it? Did he think of it as something he could play on a television set? None of the above. And the judge, of course, recognized all that: he said, "Ah, this is bullshit." Meanwhile, he got on the map, right? Nobody had ever heard of him before.

Using a legal battle to establish oneself as a public figure? Sounds kinda familiar.