Jerry Lawson: Dedicated to the man who changed video games, it’s Google’s Doodle

Today’s (1/12) Google Doodle is dedicated to the engineer, Gerald “Jerry” Lawsona pioneer in the development of video games. His inventions and those of his collaborators who worked under his supervision were the forerunners of modern video game systems.

Jerry Lawson was born on this day in Brooklyn, New York on USA in 1940. He started tinkering with electronics at a very young age, mostly fixing televisions in his neighborhood, while also building his own radio station.

Later, he studied at Queens College and City College of New York in New York before moving to Palo Alto, California to begin his rich career in tech companies when Silicon Valley was still in its… infancy.

A few years after moving to California, Lawson was hired by Fairchild Semiconductor as a consultant and after some time was promoted to Director of Development and Marketing for the company’s video game division. There he led the creation of the Fairchild Channel F system. This was the first home console where the user could change “cassettes”. It also had a digital stick and the ability to pause. Channel F paved the way for other consoles such as Atari, SNES, Dreamcast and others.

In 1980, Lawson formed his own company called VideoSoft, one of the first video game companies to be owned by an African-American. The company developed the software that was later used in popular Atari consoles. His company may have closed after five years, but he was already considered a pioneer in the field, and companies hired him as a consultant to develop more user-friendly consoles.

On April 9, 2011, he breathed his last in Santa Clara, California. That same year the Game Developers Association International recognized Lawson as one of the industry’s pioneers. USC College established the Gerald A. Lawson Fund to support students who could not afford to study the subject. Lawson’s achievements are also featured in the World Video Game Hall of Fame in Rochester, New York.