Gerald “Jerry” Lawson, one of the first black people in the video game industry, received an award Google with today’s doodle.

Google has created a mini-interactive game with milestones in Lawson’s life, after which users can play various video games. You can also create your own video game or make changes to existing ones.

The African-American computer engineer was born on this day, December 1, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York.

He started making electronic games for fun in his garage. In 1976, he was part of the team that created the first video game cartridge, essentially opening up the magical world of gaming to the general public.

Brief Summary

Jerry Lawson got into electronics at a young age, repairing televisions and building his own radio station from parts purchased from local electronics stores.

After attending Queens College and the City College of New York, he moved to California and joined Silicon Valley pioneer Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970 as an application development consultant.

While working at Fairchild, he created Demolition Derby, a coin-operated arcade game that was one of the first microprocessor-based games.

At the time, game consoles came preloaded with a number of games, such as Atari’s Pong. The tape, created by Jerry Lawson, has revolutionized.

In the mid-1970s, he was appointed director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild’s video game division, where he led the development of the Fairchild Channel F console. This console featured an eight-way joystick designed by Lawson himself and a first-of-its-kind pause button.

He left Fairchild in 1980 to found Videosoft, a video game development company that created software for the legendary Atari 2600, one of the most popular video game consoles. Although the company closed five years later, Lawson had already established himself as an industry pioneer.

In 2011, Lawson was recognized as an industry pioneer by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for his work on the cartridge video game concept.

Jerry Lawson died of complications from diabetes about a month after the IGDA awarded him the award.