Jerry Lawson: The Black Man Who Revolutionized Gaming As We Know It - IGN (2024)

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.

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.’”

At the time, Jerry was one of the very few Black engineers in the field. When asked by Vintage Computing and Gaming how being a Black engineer affected his job prospects, Mr. Lawson responded, “[It] could be both a plus and a minus. Where it could be a plus is that, in some regard, you got a lot of, shall we say, eyes watching you. And as a result, if you did good, you did twice as good, ’cause you got instant notoriety about it.”

If Fairchild had a Yelp page in the 1970s, they would’ve had two stars, all citing poor customer service. Jerry recalled his first couple of months with Fairchild in his VC&G interview: “When I was there for the first six months, I said, ‘You know, there’s a problem here. The problem is that Fairchild is not known for being helpful for customers. And I’ve got an image to overcome: how the heck to break down that image they have.’” So, Jerry worked to connect Fairchild more directly to its audience to provide a one-on-one personal experience. With the help of Fairchild’s marketing department, Jerry was able to convert an RV into an interactive space, with rear-facing screens, literature about the company, and a lab on wheels. The experiment paid off. “It looked like something from James Bond,” Jerry said. “It even had a rear-projection screen that came out of the ceiling. It turned out to be an overwhelming success; so, they came back to me and said, ‘We want you to do it again.’”

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.

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.”