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“Another company had the idea for the console but it was Fairchild that commercialised it,” says Andersen Lawson. The games were never publicly released, however, and following the notorious North American video game crash of 1983, he shut up shop in 1984 and worked as a consulting engineer thereafter.

He died from complications of diabetes in 2011, aged 70.Īfter moving on from Fairchild in 1980, Lawson founded Video Soft, which created games for the Atari 2600. As a side project, he created a coin-op arcade game called Demolition Derby, and as a result he was approached by his bosses to become the lead engineer in the company’s new gaming division. It was his work as an engineer at San Jose-based Fairchild Semiconductor, though, that was truly pioneering. This influenced his decision to become an engineer, and after moving to California, he became a member of Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, a hobbyist collective that included Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak among its members. Born in New York in 1940, he developed a strong interest in electronics during his youth, when he often fixed his neighbours’ small appliances as a hobby.

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Lawson was featured in Netflix’s High Score documentary series on the history of video games last year. But black innovators such as Jerry Lawson have been present and influential since the earliest days of the video games industry – and there is not enough recognition for their achievements. The Independent Game Developers’ Association records that only 2% of US game developers identify as black in the UK, meanwhile, according to UKIE’s 2020 census of the entire industry, 10% of its workers are black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME). And I’m also certain that he earned his respect … My father was a person of colour and I think that would inspire young people today to jump in and help move the industry along.”īlack people, and especially black women, are still underrepresented in the video games industry. But I never heard any grumblings from him. “Was it difficult ? Yes, I’m quite certain. “There have been conversations recently about the struggles he might have had that were related to his colour,” he says. His son, Andersen Lawson, recalls that he was often working on gaming projects in the garage of their family home in Santa Clara, California. Smith also ran for 49 yards and a touchdown on seven carries.Īs a result of Smith’s latest game, he was named the NFC Player of Week 4.I n the 1970s, in the fledgling days of the video games industry, an engineer named Gerald “Jerry” Lawson designed one of the earliest game consoles, the Channel F, and also led the team that invented the game cartridge, a defining innovation in how games were made and sold. In Week 4, Smith helped lead the Seahawks to a 48-45 win over the Detroit Lions after throwing for 320 yards and two touchdowns while completing 23-of-30 pass attempts. Smith won the job, and since then, he has silenced his critics. Without Mayfield, the Seahawks were left with former Broncos quarterback Drew Lock and former Seahawks backup quarterback Geno Smith. Fans and media alike were not exactly confident in the quarterback battle between Lock and Smith throughout the preseason. There were persistent rumors over the summer that the team was interested in trading for Baker Mayfield, but a deal between Cleveland and Seattle never materialized. In that moment, many onlookers from around the NFL landscape believed the Seahawks faced a dire quarterback crisis. The Seattle Seahawks moved on from Russell Wilson this past offseason, trading him to the Denver Broncos. Geno Smith has proved his doubters wrong, as he has been phenomenal as the starting quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks.

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