Who is Gerald Lawson, considered “one of the fathers of modern video gaming”?

tribute This 82-year-old American contributed to the design of the Fairchild Channel F console

Video game controllers. (Drawing). — Pixabay

On the Google home page this Thursday, you will see a man playing poker. the video game console: this is Gerald Lawson, a pioneer in the field. In a biography, Google refers to this engineer as having “led; the team that developed the first video game system to Interchangeable game cartridges”. Cartridges, which can be found in the Nintendo Switch in the form of MicroSD, or in the GameBoy and the Nintendo 3DS.

And, even if the cartridge format has now left instead of other more sophisticated modes such as optical discs (DVD, Blu-ray) and dematerialized access. thanks to the virtual, the old console generations used it massively. These include the N64, the Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive.

Access to this content has been blocked in order to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on « I‘ACCEPT », you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I‘ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our “I accept for today” button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.

He invents the first mobile console. cartridge

But Gerald Lawson is best known for a rather confidential project: the design of the Fairchild Chanel F, the first console to be hand-held. cartridge. Home console marketed in 1976 in North America and discontinued in production. in 1983, it belongs to; the second generation  like the Atari 2.600 or the Colecovision. For example, a console like Nintendo’s NES is part of the third generation starting in 1983.

It’s within the company Fairchild Semiconductor that Gerald Lawson, now aged 82, developed the console of the same name, before creating his own company, VideoSoft. His impact on the video game industry is celebrated throughout the world. by a prize that bears his name, the Jerry Lawson Award for Achievement in Game Development. Note that Gerald Lawson, described by Google as “one of the fathers of modern video games”, does not have a Wikipedia page.