As a teen, he made money by repairing televisions.Īfter he moved to the Bay Area and was working at Fairchild, Lawson belonged to a home inventors club that included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak the pair would go on to found Apple. He was a lifelong inventor who attended college but did not earn a college degree, according to his obituary in The New York Times. How Lawson got into gamesĪ groundbreaker as one of the few African American engineers in the industry at the time, Lawson grew up in Queens, New York. Lawson, who died in 2011 at the age of 70 due to complications of diabetes, "literally created an industry that is bigger than the movie industry," said John William Templeton, executive producer of curriculum and content for ReUNION: Education-Arts-Heritage, which creates programming for schools. Regardless, the Channel F established the concept of a console that could play an unlimited number of games, the foundation for today's global video game market, which is projected to surpass $160 billion in 2020, according to research firm Newzoo. The system would sell about 250,000 units while the Atari 2600, which would get hits such as "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids," would go on to sell about 30 million units. But Atari's name recognition and marketing heft basically pushed the Channel F into video game history obscurity. The console beat the Atari 2600 to market by one year. The Fairchild Video Entertainment System, later named the Channel F (for "Fun"), which began selling in 1976, had games such as hockey, tennis, blackjack and a maze game that foreshadowed Pac-Man. "A lot of people in the industry swore that a microprocessor couldn’t be used in video games and I knew better," Lawson said during a speech at the 2005 Classic Gaming Expo in San Francisco posted on YouTube. Women's suffrage: These 19 black women fought for voting rights (The Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, also used game "cards," that were printed circuit boards, but did not contain game data as the subsequent cartridges did.)īut Lawson, an engineer and designer at Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., led a team at the Silicon Valley semiconductor maker charged with creating a game system using Fairchild's F8 microprocessor and storing games on cartridges.īlack History Month essay: I searched a continent a world away, hoping to find 'home' Those initial consoles had a selection of games hardwired into the console itself. Lawson oversaw the creation of the Channel F, the first video game console with interchangeable game cartridges – something the first Atari and Magnavox Odyssey systems did not use. Each evokes memories of the golden age of video games, which brought the first wave of consoles you could connect to your home television.īut there's an oft-forgotten person from that era whose contributions to the industry still resonate today: a black engineer named Jerry Lawson.
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