Search “video box” inventor” on Google. Have you seen Jerry Lawson? Good. So why do so many people not know this fact?
It may have to do with confusion about the actual creator of the vehicle. 10 years after his death, Lawson is still not a household name. Why?
Click Start
If you grew up in the 80s and 90s, you will remember the cartridge era. No cartridges, games like Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, Metroid, Sonic the Hedgehog, Madden NFLand Street Fighter II will never be possible. And without Jerry Lawson, the cartridge wouldn’t be possible.
In August, Anthony Frasier, a black media and technology entrepreneur from Newark, New Jersey, created and narrated Enhance the game, an original podcast can be listened to. He wonders aloud why so few people understand Lawson’s impact. Lawson, that’s right inventor and engineer of the video game cartridge, created an essential component of the multi-billion dollar gaming industry. So why are his achievements hidden behind a white wall?
Frasier says he discovered Lawson’s story while working in Silicon Valley trying to build his tech startup. He attended a memorial service for Lawson even though he was just a random person who never knew him. “I left that day inspired, but angry that I was robbed of examples like these to serve as role models for my future career. I want to put an end to that.” Although he started the project in 2019, when he first connected with Audible, all the research and arranging all the interviews could not be completed until this year. 10th anniversary of Lawson’s death.
Player One: Lawson’s Life
Its it’s not difficult to learn more about Lawson if you go looking. Born in 1940, in Brooklyn, New York, Lawson grew up on projects in Jamaica, Queens, where kids like him were often fired.
Lawson’s grandfather was from the South and trained in physics, worked for the post office and eventually became a postmaster — getting a job in science in the South for a Black man in the South. That is unthinkable. So Lawson became interested in science very early. Lawson’s father was a seafarer who worked three days a week, during which time he would make as much money as the average person would make in six days. However, the seafarer nurtured in the boy a passion that would lead him to greatness. Lawson’s mother used a fake address to get him into a white school, and was the biggest inspiration for his later career. She also bought it for him Hallicrafters Model S-38 Shortwave radio led to the Lawson building’s transmitters and antennas. By the age of 13, he was building radios from scratch and selling them to neighborhood kids. He also works for local shops. They will commission him to fix their client’s TV and he also works on HAM radio.
In 1968, Lawson and his wife moved to Silicon Valley to be near emerging technologies, such as microprocessors, transistors, and semiconductors. Lawson got a job as a field application engineering consultant for Fairchild Cameras and Instrumentsbasically a travel debugger.
Four years later, in 1972, Lawson came across a video game and was immediately captivated by Pong. A year earlier, Intel had released its 4004 microprocessor. The microprocessor had never been used in a game before, but Lawson had an idea that he could put the microprocessor into a video game. He designed a coin-operated video game cabinet: Derby destruction. He tried it out at a local pizzeria, and it turned out to be quite popular. Inside is a Fairchild F8 processor. Someone already knew about his side project, and while some wanted to fire Lawson because seems to be his conflict of interest in creating video games on the side with his own microprocessors, the executives immediately promoted him. Soon after, Lawson became director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild’s new video games division.
Also around this time, home consoles evolved, but these consoles have no memory of them. Before cartridges, video games were just above control panel, pre-programmed. Players have trouble playing the same few games or buying a new console that has new games on it, and buying a new console is expensive.
