Gerald Anderson Lawson – By Unknown but currently held by Museum of Play/Estate of Jerry Lawson.

Gerald Anderson Lawson (Dec. 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011) was an American electronics engineer. Besides being one of the first African American computer engineers in Silicon Valley, Lawson was also known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console, leading the team that refined ROM cartridges for durable use as commercial video game cartridges. His innovations led to him being considered the father of the game cartridge.

In 1970, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in San Francisco as an applications engineering consultant within their sales division. While there, he created a coin-operated video game called Demolition Derby in his garage, which was never released. Completed in early 1975 using Fairchild's new F8 microprocessors, Demolition Derby was among the earliest microprocessor-driven games.

In the mid-1970s, Lawson was made chief hardware engineer and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild's video game division. There, he led the development of the Fairchild Channel F console, released in 1976 and specifically designed to use swappable game cartridges based on technology licensed from Alpex.

At the time, most game systems had the game programming built into the hardware so it could not be removed or changed. Lawson and his team refined and improved technology developed at Alpex that allowed games to be stored as software on removable ROM cartridges. These could be inserted and removed repeatedly from a console unit without any danger of electric shocks.

In 1980, Lawson left Fairchild and founded Videosoft, a video game development company that made software for the Atari 2600, as the 2600 had displaced the Channel F as the top system in the market. Videosoft did not release any games, although their incomplete titles were saved and distributed to collectors in 2010. Videosoft closed about five years later, and Lawson started to take on consulting work.

Around 2003, Lawson started having complications from diabetes, losing the use of one leg and sight from one eye. On April 9, 2011, about one month after being honored by the International Game Developers Association, he died of complications from diabetes.

The interactive Google Doodle game on Dec. 1, 2022, was dedicated to Lawson to celebrate what would have been his 82nd birthday, allowing the user to make games, edit existing built-in games and share games. On June 9, 2023, Norman Caruso's YouTube series “The Gaming Historian” profiled Lawson and the birth of the Fairchild Channel F video game system in its episode, "The Story of the First Video Game Cartridge."

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