The Father of Cartridge-Based Consoles

Owen Good — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:00:00 MDT

Overshadowed in popular culture by the Atari VCS, the Fairchild Channel F is little more today than the answer to a trivia stumper: the first game console to use cartridges. And this man built it.

Reader Knoxximus passed along this interview, from February, with Jerry Lawson, who was the director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild Semiconductor's video game division. He was a contemporary of men named Jobs, Wozniak and Bushnell. In his garage he created one of the first coin-operated games after Pong. Its success led Fairchild to tap him for a super secret project to bring a game from an Intel 8080 processor over to the Fairchild's F8 - the CPU of the Channel F.

He was also, and this has to be said, an African-American man in a field that was overwhelmingly white in the 1970s. It's not to say Lawson faced overt barriers to his work because of his ethnicity. Mostly, people who met him expressed surprise that he was black, because none of his contemporaries ever referred to his race, just what he did. But Lawson's work on console gaming is another contribution to our culture that is not commonly credited to the black community.

On Father's Day 2009, the era of ROM-based console gaming seems on the cusp of its long denouement, with downloadable content on the rise and the cloud on the horizon. But let's take a moment to consider one of the true fathers of video gaming: Jerry Lawson.

Photo by Peter Fuller

VC&G Interview: Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer [Vintage Computing and Gaming, thanks Knoxximus]

The Consoles of Our Ancestors

Owen Good — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:00:00 MDT

Back when I was your age, we played games that sucked and were no fun and we liked it, because it built character, and building character was fun (it was an early form of achievement farming). In fact, we used a slide projector to create finger-shadow combatants for Mortal Kombat, and it was a hoot when granddad had to roll the dice correctly in the correct order to get a fatality.

So that's a big brown blip on the bullshit radar, isn't it. Yeah, thought so. Instead for you, GamesRadar has a comprehensive timeline of all of the video game consoles of the 1970s and I was surprised to learn just how many there were besides the 2600 and the Pong console. Oh, some family friends had the Fairchild (above), that made visiting their home like going to a foreign country where the toilets flushed backward. Except for the Odyssey (actually, we only saw the Odyssey II) I don't think anything other than the Atari retailed in my hometown. Then again, we didn't get a McDonald's until 1980. We had to have our birthday parties at a typewriter repair shop. And we liked it!

Consoles of the 70s [GamesRadar]

Kotaku: fairchild channel f

The Father of Cartridge-Based Consoles

The Consoles of Our Ancestors