Google Doodle for Dec. 1 honors Jerry Lawson, father of video game cartridges

Google’s Doodle — the altered and sometimes interactive logo on the search engine’s home page — for Dec. 1 is a tribute to Jerry Lawson, the computer engineer credited with developing the first cartridges for console video games almost 50 years ago. The Doodle lets people play five games in demake style and allows users to edit or modify them.

The Doodle begins with a short tour of Lawson’s life and accomplishments; he would have turned 82 on Thursday. Then players are shown how to edit the Doodle’s games; four of them are puzzle/platformer side-scrollers, and one is a Breakout-like.

Google put together a short documentary video about Lawson’s life, which includes commentary from Lawson’s son, as well as the three developers behind the Doodle — all of whom are Black. Lawson was one of Silicon Valley’s first Black computer engineers, and was honored for his career and achievements in 2011 by the International Game Developers Association, one month before he died.

Gerald “Jerry” Lawson was born Dec. 1, 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, and developed an interest in electrical engineering early in life, repairing televisions and building an amateur radio station at age 13. After college, he moved to northern California in 1970 to join Fairchild Semiconductor, where he would become the company’s chief hardware engineer.

Fairchild’s Channel F was launched in 1976. It was the first console that used swappable cartridges instead of having the games embedded into it. The cartridge-based approach was Lawson’s idea; his other innovations included the Channel F’s eight-position joystick controller, which also included a pause button — both firsts in console gaming. Although the Channel F was one year ahead of the Atari VCS, later called the Atari 2600, the VCS sold more than it by about 3-to-1 in 1979 when Fairchild purchased the technology from Zircon International.

Lawson then founded Videosoft, a game software developer that was short-lived, and went into consulting, among other entrepreneurial endeavors. The Strong National Museum of Play has a permanent exhibit dedicated to Lawson’s work and contributions. Take-Two Interactive established a scholarship to honor Lawson at the University of Southern California in 2021. This was created in order for Black students and other indigenous students to pursue careers in engineering and game design.