How a Black engineer changed the video game industry forever
USA TODAY, adapted by Newsela staff
PUBLISHED2/10/2021
Atari, Magnavox and Intellivision: For people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, those names may bring up memories of a golden age of video games. Atari, Magnavox and Intellivision were among the first companies to produce at-home video game consoles. Theirs were the first devices to be connected to a television so that people could play games at home.
There’s a forgotten person from that era whose contributions
to the industry were essential. He was a Black engineer named Jerry Lawson. An engineer is a person who solves problems by inventing, designing, testing and building things.
Lawson oversaw the creation of the Channel F. It was the first video game console to use different, interchangeable game cartridges. The first Atari and Magnavox systems did not have game cartridges like that. Instead, they had a limited number of games built right into the console.
Lawson worked at a company called Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. As a designer and engineer, he led a team that created a game system. It used Fairchild’s F8 computer processor and stored games on cartridges. A computer’s processor provided the instructions and processing power it needed to do its work.
In a speech he gave in 2005, Lawson remembered that a lot of people in the industry had doubted whether computer processors could be used in video games. “I knew better,” he said.
The Fairchild Video Game Entertainment System began selling in 1976, with games such as hockey, tennis and a maze game that foreshadowed “Pac-Man.” It was later named the “Channel F.” The “F” stood for Fun.
Zoom inThe Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp.’s Channel F home video game system, the first to use interchangeable game cartridges, on display at the Strong Museum. Courtesy of the Strong Museum.
Before Atari, There Was Channel F
The Channel F console beat the Atari 2600 to market by one year, but Atari’s popularity and marketing pushed the Channel F into video game history. The Channel F system would sell about 250,000 units. The Atari 2600, which featured hit games such as “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids,” would go on to sell about 30 million units.
Still, the Channel F launched the concept of a unit that could play an unlimited number of games. This is the foundation for today’s global video game market, which surpassed $160 billion in 2020, according to research firm Newzoo.
Lawson “literally created an industry that is bigger than the movie industry,” said John William Templeton. Templeton is an author and a historian of Black culture in California.
How Lawson Got Into Games
Lawson grew up in Queens, New York. He was a lifelong inventor who attended college but did not earn a college degree, according to his obituary in The New York Times. As a teen, he made money by repairing televisions.
Later he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began working at Fairchild. Lawson belonged to a home inventors club that included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who later founded the company Apple together. Lawson also built his own arcade game called “Demolition Derby” in his garage. That creation led Fairchild to ask him to focus on games.
Lawson later founded his own video game company, called Videosoft. It created games for the Atari 2600 and made some of the first 3-D games. However, he closed the company during the video game crash of the mid-1980s. Many video game companies went out of business in these years.
In 2011, Lawson was invited to a Blacks in Gaming gathering at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. There were about 70 Black developers there listening to him, Templeton said. “It was just extremely emotional for them because for their entire lives, their professional lives, they had been feeling like outsiders and then they [could say], ‘Hey, wait a minute, somebody who looks like me started the whole thing’.”
At that time, Gordon Bellamy was the executive director of the International Gaming Developers Association (IGDA). He recalled how the event helped younger Black people working in video games understand how their careers were built on Lawson’s legacy.
In the early ’90s, Bellamy was one of the few Black people working in video games. He rose to become a lead designer on Electronic Arts’s John Madden Football franchise. “We are a continuation of a history,” said Bellamy, who seven years later got an IGDA lifetime achievement award — an award that was named after Lawson.
His Place In Video Game History
Lawson died in 2011 at the age of 70. Today, an exhibit of his work is on permanent display at the World Video Game Hall of Fame at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. There, you can see the Channel F game system and some of Videosoft’s games. The museum also has Lawson’s papers in its collection. Lawson and the Channel F game system are also included in “A History of Video Games in 64 Objects,” a book published by the museum in 2018.
Zoom in Some of the artifacts relating to the career of Jerry Lawson, who oversaw the creation of the Channel F home video game system. Channel F was the first to use interchangeable game cartridges. Courtesy of the Strong Museum.
The museum seeks to bring to light the contributions of people of color and women in the video game industry. There is a lack of representation of Black game developers in the industry, said Jeremy Saucier, a museum official.
“The major figures often tend to be white men,” Saucier said. “We really want to get the history right and tell a more inclusive history.”