Who is Gerald Lawson? Google Doodle pays tribute to the inventor of video game cartridges

Google Doodle commemorated Gerald Lawson, the pioneering inventor of the video game cartridge, on his 82nd birth anniversary on Thursday, November 30.

Gerald was an electronics engineer based in the United States. He is known for leading the team that developed and designed the first video game cartridge for commercial use.

Google honored Gerald with its Google Doodle feature where people can play a number of mini-games.

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Gerald Lawson's company, VideoSoft, was one of the earliest video game development houses

Born in New York in 1940, Lawson had a knack for repairing electronic devices from an early age. He even repaired TVs and built his own radio station with store-bought parts.

He went to Queens College and also attended the City University in New York. But he didn’t finish his degree at either institution. In 1970, Gerald moved to San Francisco, where he was assigned the role of an applications engineering consultant at Fairchild Semiconductor.

During that time, Gerald developed a coin-operated arcade game in his garage, called the Demolition Derby.

Gerald left the company in 1980 and built his own company named VideoSoft. It is among the earliest video game development houses owned by black people.

Gerald led the team that created the video game cartridge, which was popularized in the Atari 2600 software developed by VideoSoft. They were also the creators of the video game system called Fairchild Channel.

The company shut down after five years. However, Lawson continued his work by consulting with multiple video game companies for the rest of his professional career.

The video game system developed by Gerald Lawson came with interchangeable game cartridges. He is called the ‘father of the video game cartridge’ for his sincere contribution.

Jeremy Saucier, who works as the assistant vice president for electronic games and interpretation based in New York, wrote about Gerald Lawson in an email:

"Jerry Lawson played a pivotal role in helping lay the foundations for today's $150 billion video game industry."

Vintage Computing and Gaming’s editor-in-chief Benj Edwards, who interviewed Gerald in 2009, also wrote:

"Jerry was a big name in Silicon Valley in the 1970s because people came to him for semiconductor chips from Fairchild. It's neat to know there was a Black man in that position at the time, and you know his story must have been amazing to get him there."

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Gerald Lawson's video game cartridges depicted in Google-Doodle's mini-games

Google Doodle designed a small library of mini-games that resemble the early video games from the 1970s. As the game begins and starts to progress, small pieces of information about Lawson’s career appear on the screen.

Users can also edit the games and make certain convenient changes in the game to remove obstacles.

Gerald Lawson's contribution to the video gaming world was on the verge of being forgotten, until in 2011 when he was recognized by the International Game Developers Association as an industry trailblazer. Unfortunately, Gerald passed away just a month later. But Lawson’s legacy has been alive ever since.

The first game in the collection of pixelated mini-games on Google Doodle starts with an 8-bit figure of Gerald Lawson whose goal is to reach the flag. The other games are similar in their approach, just with different types of paths to run and different obstacles to remove.

The mini-games are shown as cartridges that can be both played and edited by the players. One can also delete the game records after playing it once and can then start again from the beginning. There’s also an option to share the number of levels reached.