As it turns out, the man I encountered that day was Jerry Lawson, creator of the world’s first cartridge-based video game system, the Fairchild Channel F. Naturally, he was attending VCF 9 to give a presentation called, “The Story of the Fairchild Channel F Video Game System.”
Being the only black man (I know of) who was deeply involved in the industry’s earliest days, Jerry Lawson is a singular figure in video game and computer history. He’s a self-taught electronics genius who, with incredible talents, audacity, and strong guidance from his parents, managed to end up at the top of his profession despite the cultural tides flowing against him.
Growing up in America, a land of endless diversity, we tend to fall into certain cultural grooves — well-defined paths of cultural history — that both unite and separate us. We get comfortable with those grooves and use them as the basis of our assumptions about behavior within certain age groups, socioeconomic classes, and ethnicities. Despite this ingrained cultural momentum, there are still rogue agents who manage to skip those grooves and chart their own course, damning any conventions that get in their way. Jerry Lawson is one of them, and he’s got an important story to tell.
— Vintage Computing and Gaming | Archive » VC&G Interview: Jerry Lawson, Black Video Game Pioneer(wow!)
