8/1/2023 0 Comments Pioner video![]() This company sold a copy of 'Super Mario Bros.' for $2 million.Geoffrey Hinton speaks during The International Economic Forum of the Americas Toronto Global Forum in Toronto, Canada, in 2019. Remember these failed Apple products? They were some of the tech giant's biggest flops Sign up now: Get smarter about your money and career with our weekly newsletter "To break new horizons, you had to break some rules." "You had to be a maverick to get things done," Lawson remarked in his 2005 speech. That, it seems, is also how Lawson saw himself. Still, Lawson's influence lives on through an annual IGDA award meant to highlight the work of minority developers in the industry, as well as a University of Southern California endowment fund in his name supported by Microsoft and video game company Take-Two Interactive.Īnnouncing the fund, which is for Black and Indigenous students studying video game design, USC described Lawson in May as "one of the fathers of modern gaming." The industry still struggles with diversity today: A 2020 report from the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) found that only 2% of developers in the industry identified as Black. Lawson said in his 2009 interview that he hoped his career could inspire other Black students to get into engineering and the gaming industry. The company only lasted a few years, but Lawson spent the rest of his career consulting for gaming and tech companies, and mentoring Stanford University engineering students, according to his 2011 obituary in The Los Angeles Times. It was "likely the earliest Black-owned game development company," according to the National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Lawson left Fairchild in 1980 and founded Videosoft, which made gaming software for the Atari 2600 and other developers. In 2015, Fast Company noted that Atari defeated the Channel F primarily because it had a brand name gamers already knew and an existing catalog of popular games, like "Pac-Man." The gaming company released its own console with interchangeable cartridges and a joystick just a year later, in 1977 - and the Atari 2600 went on to sell more than 30 million units in its lifetime. ![]() Zircon canceled the Channel F a few years later.Ītari was "close on our heels," Lawson admitted. ![]() When the Channel F hit the market in 1976, Lawson said, Fairchild's competitors "were so afraid of the cartridge concept, that it was going to put them out of business."īut Fairchild only sold about 350,000 units before selling its gaming technology to electronics company Zircon in 1979. After Fairchild sent Lawson to meet with Alcorn, to discuss electronic parts for "Pong," a switch flipped in Lawson's brain: He began a side project building his own coin-operated video game in his garage.Īnd when Fairchild found out about the game, called "Demolition Derby," the company convinced him to build a much fancier gaming console at work. Once, he said, he met Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at the Homebrew Computer Club, a local hobbyist group - and "was not impressed with them - either one, in fact."īut Alcorn impressed him. Lawson ran in similar circles as some of Silicon Valley's more well-known giants. "If you did good, you did twice as good, you got instant notoriety about it," Lawson said. ![]() As one of the few Black engineers in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, Lawson told Vintage Computing & Gaming in 2009, his skin color "could be both a plus and minus."īeing an anomaly in tech helped him stand out - in both productive and uncomfortable ways. Lawson was raised in Queens, New York City and never graduated from college. ![]()
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