Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft can thank a black engineer for interchangeable games: how Jerry Lawson changed the face of the video game industry
- Lawson oversaw the creation of the Channel F, the first video game console with interchangeable game cartridges
- One of the few black engineers in the industry at the time, Lawson established the concept of a console that could play an unlimited number of games
Atari. Magnavox. Intellivision. Each evokes memories of the golden age of video games, which brought the first wave of consoles people could connect to their home television. But there is an oft-forgotten person from that era whose contributions to the industry still resonate today: a black engineer named Jerry Lawson.
Those initial consoles had a selection of games hard-wired into the console itself. (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.)
But Lawson, an engineer and designer at Fairchild Camera and Instrument, 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.
“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.