Pioneer of the video Game Industry - Gerald “Jerry” Lawson

I’ve decided to write a post on a man that was very important in gaming history and someone that I found very interesting to research. That man is Gerald “Jerry” Lawson.

Gerald "Jerry" Lawson

I first found out about Lawson from an article on wired about him sadly passing away. The reason that I found him so interesting what his contributions to the videogame industry, Lawson was the creator of the first cartridge-based video games console, Which was a pretty major part of videogames.

From an early age Lawson had a talent for electronics. With the self-taught knowledge he would tinker with televisions and ham radios. As an adult he worked for the computer firm Fairchild Semiconductor.

Photo from International arcade museum

Lawson created a coin-operated arcade game demolition derby, which got his company interested in making games. "I did my home coin-op game first in my garage. Fairchild found out about it — in fact, it was a big controversy that I had done that. And then, very quietly, they asked me if I wanted to do it for them so I ... sat down and wrote a business plan for building video games". During his time at Fairchild Lawson created the Fairchild Channel F the first console with removable cartridges, this meant that company could sell cartridges separately previously consoles only had one or two built in games. This has revolutionized the industry and become the standard for game consoles.

Fairchild Channel F

Lawson was part of a team that included apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the Homebrew Computer club. The members of this group went on to shape the Silicon Valley. In fact Lawson actually turned down Wozniak’s application for his games division he was “not impressed”. Lawson later left Fairchild to set up his game Company Videosoft, where he would create games for the Atari system, they only released one though called the “Color Bar Generator”.

Photo from AtariAge

As video games improved he began disapproving of the realistic violence, “I don't play video games that often, Most of the games that are out now – I'm appalled by them. They're all scenario games concerned with shooting somebody and killing somebody. To me, a game should be something like a skill you should develop – if you play this game, you walk away with something of value. That's what a game is to me”. I’m not certain if Lawson was very interested in the creation of games as much as just doing something that had not been done before. “The whole reason I did games was because people said, ‘You can’t do it,’ I’m one of the guys, if you tell me I can’t do something, I’ll turn around and do it”.

Companies such as Atari and subsequently Nintendo later exceeded Lawson. And although he was not an admirer of the direction of video games, there is no denying his sizeable contribution to the video game industry. And I just wish he could have seen some of the newer indie titles, which really follow his views on games such as ‘gone home’ and ‘Antichamber’.