Jerry Lawson Forever Changed the Video Game Industry

And he did have an amazing story. According to Edwards' interview, Lawson was born in Queens, New York, in December 1940. He grew up with a fierce mother who ensured that her son received the best schooling possible, and a longshoreman father with an avid interest in science.

It was under these various influences that Lawson was able to cultivate his natural interest in engineering, tinkering with various electronics and even creating his own amateur radio station at the age of 13.

He studied at Queens College and City College of New York (CCNY), but Lawson's engineering skills were largely self-taught, and he made his way to California's burgeoning Silicon Valley.

He eventually landed in 1970 at Fairchild, a semiconductor company where he worked as a field engineer — one of the few Black men in the industry at the time. Lawson also interacted with other people who would later become even more influential in the technology industry, such as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, in the Homebrew Computing Club.

But it was while working at Fairchild that he met engineer Allan "Al" Alcorn, the "father of Pong," as Lawson called him in a 2005 keynote event.

Alcorn designed and built the two-dimensional tennis game Pong as "employee No. 3" for Atari, Inc., a company started by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney that quickly became a pioneer in arcade games and the home games industry. Released in 1972 as one of the first video games, Pong became a smash hit and catalyzed the commercial video game industry. Alcorn met Lawson while scouting for electronic parts for Pong.

"I had a question about a certain part that Fairchild made. They sent out a field engineer to explain how their parts worked, and that was Jerry Lawson. Jerry helped me out, and [we] became friends at that point," said Alcorn, when we talked to him in 2020.

In a sense, Lawson and Alcorn were both friends and competitors in the same space, or "frenemies" as Alcorn pleasantly recalled with a laugh.

According to a story that he told at the keynote event, Lawson remembered hearing about a coin-operated Pong game being placed in a beer hall or pizza parlor in Sunnyvale, California, which local kids would shock with a wire, leading the game to drop all its coins for the children to steal. This coin-stealing helped inspire the engineering behind Lawson's own coin-operated video game, Demolition Derby, which possessed a "coin defeat" mode to prevent local kids from stealing coins from the game.

Although Alcorn didn't recall this specific story, he did remember Lawson mysteriously retreating into his work before reemerging with the Fairchild Channel F.

"After working with me as a sales engineer for Fairchild, he disappeared, and the next thing I know, Fairchild's coming out with a home video game player," said Alcorn.

What really happened: Lawson's superiors at Fairchild got wind of his side work on games, and they decided to secretly enlist his skills for their semiconductor company, which wanted to get into the game industry.

"In early 1976, following Lawson's evaluation and recommendation, his employer, Fairchild, licensed prototype video game technology from Alpex Computer Corporation and tasked Lawson, one of the few Black engineers working in Silicon Valley at the time, with developing it into a commercial product," said Saucier.

The company required Lawson and the other Fairchild team members to quickly develop a console using their specific F8 microprocessor. And not just any console — the first commercial cartridge-based home video game console: the Fairchild Channel F, which debuted at the Chicago Consumer Electronics Show in June 1976. Lawson particularly contributed to the project by developing a prototype for the console's controller, which enabled users to play games.

"Jerry Lawson didn't create the Channel F by himself, but he was instrumental in its creation," said Edwards. "He was a project leader of sorts, pulling it together and also championing its development. He was one of a team of engineers that designed it. He worked on the electronic circuit design and played a big part in the mechanics of the hand controller design."

Lawson was able to put his quick-thinking skills to use to bypass significant engineering problems in the creation of the Fairchild Channel F. In a public speaking engagement from 2005, Lawson recalled having an epiphany in the middle of the night about a radiation signal issue they were trying to fix. Lawson called his team member in the wee hours and they went back to the office, working on a calculation.

This calculation led to them shortening the length of the game controllers, which fixed the radiation signal issue and allowed them to bypass the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which had been blocking the approval of their product. Lawson also was tenacious — he sat in the FCC's lobby for three days until someone finally gave him approval for his product.

"He was very practical at solving problems, and he impressed me. He was very smart," said Alcorn.

Although the Channel F garnered some interest when it launched on the consumer market in the fall of 1976, it wasn't exactly a smashing success, especially since the Atari Video Computer System (also known as the Atari 2600) console — developed by Alcorn and others at Atari — quickly dominated the industry when it hit shelves the following year.

Alcorn said that the lack of commercial success for the Fairchild Channel F was due more to the semiconductor company's inexperience with video games, whereas Atari's bread-and-butter was games, so they were better equipped to tackle the home games market.

But Alcorn offered nothing but praise for Lawson's work on the Fairchild Channel F.

"The Fairchild Channel F was designed the way you should design a video game," said Alcorn.

Saucier agreed, and described the Fairchild Channel F's "innovative eight-way digital joystick" which "would get a second life when a third party manufacturer rereleased the joystick for Atari's console."

The game also introduced, for the first time, the 'pause' mechanism in the video game world, which any player will know is handy when you need to take a bathroom break.

"But its most significant achievement was its use of interchangeable cartridges, which proved revolutionary," said Saucier. "The potential of playing dozens, or even hundreds of individual games on a platform unlocked the possibility of selling tens of millions of games."

After leaving Fairchild, Lawson continued to work as an engineer, even working with Alcorn from time to time. Lawson also kept a steady hand in the changing video game industry.

"In fact, after leaving Fairchild, Lawson also blazed trails as the founder of the first Black-owned video game development company, Videosoft, Inc.," said Saucier.

Lawson also fostered support for the next generation of Black engineers. In his interview with Edwards, Lawson recalled a moving story in which a child recognized him on the Las Vegas Strip, shook his hand and thanked him.

"Jerry mentored engineering students at Stanford in his older age, even when he was in relatively poor health. I think that he wanted to inspire the next generation to be great engineers," said Edwards.

In the last decade, Lawson has received renewed attention due to Edwards, John Templeton and others who called attention to Lawson's seminal work. As a result, the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) honored Lawson in 2011 for his work in moving the game industry forward. And in 2019, Lawson posthumously received the ID@Xbox Gaming Heroes Award at the Game Developer's Choice Awards.

"Jerry Lawson was undoubtedly one of the influential forces within our industry from the time he developed Demolition Derby onward, including his leadership of the Fairchild Channel F's development," said Renee Gittins, in an email statement to us in 2020. She stepped down as executive director of IGDA in February 2022.

Not long after the IGDA's honor, Lawson passed away in April 2011 at age 70 due to diabetes complications. However, his legacy lives in on in the memories of those who knew him — and in the thriving gaming industry.

"The invention of these cartridges influenced not only the console technology, but also the marketing, sales and breadth of video games made available. Without cartridges, the progress of the games industry would have been far slower and more limited. We are proud to recognize Jerry Lawson's accomplishments and influence, and it is uplifting that he remains an inspiration to this day," said Gittins.