Celebrating Jerry Lawson
A Pioneer in the Video Game Industry
Note: This is a re-publishing of a February 2024 article I did. I modernized the formatting to be closer to how I release my articles today and made slight grammatical changes.
As we celebrate Black History Month, I wanted to take a look at one of the most important and consequential early pioneers in the video game industry—Jerry Lawson. Lawson was one of the few African Americans in Silicon Valley's pioneering early days. He went on to innovate in several areas of gaming and is finally starting to get his due as one of the industry's early icons.
Background
Gerald Anderson Lawson was born December 1st, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. His grandfather had wanted to become a physicist but couldn’t further his education. His father, Blanton, was interested in science but worked as a longshoreman. His mother, Mannings, served on the Parent-Teacher association. So, Lawson had a family around him that helped foster his interests in science and education. He also looked up to scientist George Washington Carver as his hero.
Lawson had made a hobby out of ham radio, learning by taking them apart and putting them back together. He was able to make money by repairing television sets in his Queens neighborhood. By the age of 13, he got an amateur radio license and built his own station, at 13! He attended Queens College and City College of New York. With all this knowledge and experience, he was hired by Fairchild Semiconductor as an application engineering consultant for sales.
In 1970, Lawson was the only black member of Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club and met some early tech and gaming industry pioneers, such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Atari’s Nolan Bushnell. His time at the club made him more fascinated with computers and video games. Lawson was fascinated by Pong. Jerry saw the Fairchild’s F8 microprocessor as his chance to make a game. He created the game Demolition Derby in his garage as a side project. It was a whole arcade cabinet built at his house. When Fairchild found out, they were impressed and promoted him. Demolition Derby is one of the earliest games to use a microprocessor.
Lawson was one of the few black engineers in Silicon Valley, and many of his colleagues would openly talk about their surprise at his knowledge. In these early days of the tech industry, Lawson showed that African Americans were just as capable as icons like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Nolan Bushnell, and others.
"With some people, it's become an issue. I've had people look at me with total shock. Particularly if they hear my voice, because they think that all Black people have a voice that sounds a certain way, and they know it. And I sit there and go, 'Oh yeah? Well, sorry, I don't.'" - Lawson regarding his colleagues’ surprise when meeting him in person
The Fairchild Channel F and the ROM Cartridge
In the mid-1970s, Fairchild began work on making a home video game console. Jerry headed the project and wanted to fix one of the game console’s greatest weaknesses, the inability to swap in new games. The Magnavox Odyssey did have its separate games, but the Odyssey console was based on lines on the TV, not full separate files with different presentations and graphics. If Fairchild could have separate games they could individually sell to console owners, it would be a game changer. In this problem, Lawson looked at media, such as the 8-track cartridge, as his inspiration for the solution.
Fairchild licensed technology from Alpex, and Jerry refined it to create the first ROM cartridge. He focused on ensuring the cartridge's pins wouldn’t be damaged from the constant pushing and pulling. Now, video games have a new source of revenue. A catalog of titles could be sold to customers, who were, in turn, supporting their console with new games. This made the console a sound investment for the consumer and gave the manufacturers of those consoles a stream of new and recurring revenue. He also had one more innovation left to add to the system: a pause button.
The system proved a commercial failure due to its high price and inability to compete with the more action-driven titles on the Atari VCS. Nevertheless, Lawson and the Fairchild Channel F helped set the stage for the business model video game consoles would and still use today. With a way to buy multiple games at cheaper prices for one box, video games would take off.
Aftermath and Legacy
Lawson left Fairchild and created his own software company, Videosoft. It was the first black-owned video game company. During his time running it, he worked with Activision to reverse engineer Atari and prove they didn’t steal trade secrets, setting the stage for third-party companies to flood the market with their own games. Eventually, Videosoft closed, and he became a consultant. He even worked with Stevie Wonder on a project that never made it to market.
Lawson' would be forgotten in the heat of the 1990s console wars, but with social media and the internet’s rise, his legacy has made a comeback, and now more gamers know who Jerry is. Lawson is now given the respect he deserves for pioneering the video game cartridge and setting the foundation of the eventual business model that made an industry. His consultant work with Activision to fight off Atari’s attacks in court set the stage for today’s important third-party and indie developers. He was honored by the International Game Developers Association in 2011, one month before he passed from complications of diabetes.
Lawson doing all this as an African American amid the tech and gaming pioneering decade of the 1970s with many legendary, but mostly white, pioneers is impressive. Lawson’s legacy deserves to be up there with the likes of Strachey, Baer, Bushnell, and Yamauchi as the true founding fathers of the gaming industry.
Today, the Gerald A. Lawson fund helps to support black and Indigenous students enrolled at the University of Southern California who are seeking careers in the video game industry. It has also received contributions from Take-Two Interactive, Microsoft, and Sony.
SOURCES
Wikipedia - Jerry Lawson (engineer)
Wikipedia - Fairchild Channel F
Biography.com - biography.com/inventor/jerry-lawson
Toys that Built America (TV Show) - "The Birth of Video Games"
Be Nice to All!