At 6’ 6” and 280 pounds, Jerry Lawson -- a Black man -- was extremely far from the stereotypical image of an engineer and inventor in 1970s America, or even today. But then, nothing about Jerry's life was stereotypical.
Black inventor and self-taught engineer Gerald “Jerry” Lawson was one of the few Black engineers of his time; yet, he was almost left out of the tome of gaming history. With his work on the Fairchild Channel F Console, Jerry was the first to innovate the use of interchangeable cartridges in consumer gaming consoles, changing the landscape of the gaming industry as we know it. In 2018, the gaming industry’s estimated worth was $138 billion and is built on the backbone of consumer flexibility: being able to play multiple games comfortably in your home or on the go. None of this modern-day success would have been possible if it wasn’t for Jerry Lawson; but, let's start at the beginning.
Born December 1, 1940 in Brooklyn New York, Gerald “Jerry” Lawson was raised by his father and mother Blanton Lawson, and Manning Lawson in Queens. Jerry fondly gave his father the nickname of “science bug” (per an interview with Vintage Computing and Gaming, that I'll be citing heavily in this piece)-- no matter how long Blanton Lawson’s shift was at the docks that day, he would come home to devour science magazines.
Jerry’s mother, Manning, worked for the city of New York but she spent a lot of her time encouraging a young Jerry to focus on his education. She made sure he went to the best schools, often interviewing the staff and teachers to make sure they fit the bill. She even became the PTA president in Jerry’s grade school, which was composed of 99% white students.
It was here that his first-grade teacher, Ms.Guble, helped Jerry see a future of success. In that 2009 interview with Vintage Computing and Gaming, Lawson said he told Ms. Guble, “I have a picture of George Washington Carver on the wall next to my desk;” and she said, “This could be you.” Lawson continued, “Now, the point I'm getting at is, this kind of influence is what led me to feel, ‘I want to be a scientist. I want to be something.’”
Ms. Guble’s words stuck in his mind, and Jerry proceeded to deeply involve himself in his interests in electronics and engineering. At thirteen, this precocious and smart kid built radios alongside researching how to start his own licensed radio station. He found out that if you lived in federally funded housing, you could easily obtain a radio license. So, in Jamaica Queens, Jerry did just that, often building and maintaining his own radio equipment from scratch.
He even built an effective small enterprise fixing neighbors’ electronics. Jerry’s love of taking things apart, learning how the thing works, and then putting them back together again eventually translated to studying engineering in college. Lawson attended Queens College and CCNY, but he never received a formal degree from either institution.
In the 70s, after school, he worked for Federal Electric-ITT where he encountered his first computer. He also worked for Grumman Aircraft and PRD Electrics, jumping back and forth between different disciplines and departments between the varying companies. In the aforementioned Vintage Computing and Gaming interview, Lawson told the reporter that his work in the private sector is what prepared him for the wild landscape of consumer electronics. Jerry would often tell people that, “Military [engineering] was good training for consumer, because consumer products actually have to be stronger than military.”
Jerry’s foray into games started as a hobby when his old buddy, Pong creator Allan Alcorn, put the first Pong machine into one of their local pubs. Alcorn had issues with the coin mechanism of his machine after the local kids continually jerry-rigged it to get free games. They’d stick hangers in the slot to fool the mechanism into thinking there was an actual coin inside, allowing them to play again… for free. Inspired, Jerry decided to make his own cabinet featuring a game called Demolition Derby. Jerry built his cabinet with a coin jiggle function that made playing for free impossible for the neighborhood kids.
Fairchild soon heard about Jerry’s extracurricular activities, which put him in some hot water with the company, believing that he was going to try and branch out on his own. Instead of firing the budding gaming engineer, though, Fairchild asked Jerry if he wanted to develop games for them. The project was top-secret -- Jerry would only report to the vice-president. Lawson built the gaming division at Fairchild from the ground up. “I was the number one employee,” he told Vintage Computing and Gaming. “My set task was to work on the prototype and hire a bunch of people to work with me, most of which came from Fairchild.”
The Fairchild Channel F System, as it was officially called, was always meant to be an at-home gaming machine. It was its cartridge technology set, however, that set it above the competition. Lawson and his team had to figure out how to plug and unplug the cartridges without the customer being slightly maimed by an explosion in the process. “We were afraid — we didn’t have statistics on multiple-insertion and what it would do and how we would do it because it wasn’t done,” Jerry told Vintage Computing and Gaming. “I mean, think about it: nobody had the capability of plugging in memory devices in mass quantity like in a consumer product. Nobody.”
Jerry and his team of engineers were embarking into unknown territory. At the time, it was unheard of to bring a multi-game, cartridge-based system to the consumer. Gaming consoles like the Atari Pong, Sears Tele-Games, and Magnavox Odyssey 100 & 200 all had a finite amount of games programmed within the memory of the console. The Fairchild Channel F would be the first at-home gaming system to use cartridge technology. At Alpex Computer Corporation, Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel conceived the idea of removable cartridges, but it was Jerry Lawson, Ron Smith, and Nick Talesfore who cultivated the technology and transposed it for consumer use.
Jerry Lawson and his work on the Fairchild Channel F changed the face of the gaming industry. After the Channel F console, many companies followed Lawson’s ingenuity to create systems with cartridge-based games. Many gaming companies like Nintendo, Sega, Atari, PlayStation, and Xbox have benefited from a format that extended the life of their gaming consoles. And thanks to the variety of games that could be played on cartridges -- and, later, discs -- a multi-million dollar game development industry was born. If not for Jerry and his team’s innovation on the Fairchild Channel F, this current iteration of gaming would not exist.
By 2011, Lawson’s long and varied career included his own company, Videosoft, and some consulting work. As time progressed, it seems his historic work on the Fairchild Channel F console grew into a distant memory. It was not until March of 2011, as reported by the Mercury News, that John Templeton -- a publisher who was friends with an International Game Developers Association (IGDA) member, Joseph Saulter -- asked if the IGDA ever planned to recognize Jerry Lawson’s contributions. The association had reportedly never heard of Jerry Lawson. As Joseph Saulter, a Black man and founder of Atlanta based Entertainment Arts Research recounts in an interview with Mercury News, “I was really very emotional about it, as a matter of fact, I started crying — just for somebody like him to be left out.”
So Saulter led the charge into giving Lawson the recognition he deserved. It was an unconventional, informal ceremony about which Saulter explained to the Mercury News, “Lawson had waited long enough, and delaying his recognition for a more formal ceremony simply wouldn’t be right. Lawson’s story is too important.” A month later, on April 9th, 2011, Jerry Lawson lost his battle to diabetes. Jerry leaves behind an incredible history of self-made innovation, invention, and inspiration for young Black kids who want to embark on a career in science.
His advice, as cited in via VC&G: “[Black Kids] need to understand that they’re in a land by themselves. Don’t look for your buddies to be helpful, because they won’t be. You’ve gotta step away from the crowd and go do your own thing. You find a ground, cover it, it’s brand new, you’re on your own — you’re an explorer. That’s about what it’s going to be like. Explore new vistas, new avenues, new ways — not relying on everyone else’s way to tell you which way to go, and how to go, and what you should be doing.”
Jerry Lawson: The Black Man Who Revolutionized Gaming As We Know It
Meet Gerald "Jerry" Lawson, the man who pioneered the video game cartridge.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/0...k-man-who-revolutionized-gaming-as-we-know-it
but the comments...
lmao
i mean if you gonna be gay, at least be gay with a black man.
This ain’t it
The seeds of division are in each and everyone of us. Some of us recognize it and know not to spread them, and others just give into divisive speech with no regard for its ramifications.
