5 Things I Learned Working on The Jerry Lawson Documentary, Raising the Game

Much of my time during 2020’s historical lockdown was spent working on Raising the Game, an Audible Original documentary about Jerry Lawson, produced by my employer ABF Creative. Looking back, I can’t think of any better way to have spent my lockdown than working on such an impactful story. Raising the Game is the story of Jerry Lawson, a black Amercian who is documented as being the first black man to lead a video games division. In the mid 1970s, his team manufactured the Fairchild Channel F, which was the very first video games console with a cartridge function.

Will you find Jerry’s name on a patent? Not at all. And that’s exactly why it was important for ABF Creative to tell this story. Because black geniuses are often scrubbed from the history books. If the majority of human life was wiped away tomorrow, leaving only a few young folk to restart humanity, when they went back through the history books they wouldn’t find Lawson’s name anywhere near a patent. So it was our responsibility to make sure there was an honest and unbiased account of Lawson’s story for the world to hear and understand for themselves.

I urge everyone to check out Raising the Game on Audible, especially if its a service you already use. To show why I feel this story is so important, and because it’s currently Black History Month here in the UK, I’m going to break down some things I learned while writing the script for Raising the Game.

What I learned while working on Jerry Lawson documentary Raising the Game

There was confusion over who made the Channel F video game cartridge

Jerry Lawson unfortunately passed away on the 9th of April, 2011. When my good friend (and founder of ABF Creative) Anthony Frasier went to work on a project in Silicon Valley, he actually attended the memorial of Jerry Lawson. At this time, people were openly stating that Jerry Lawson created the first video game cartridge.

While Jerry didn’t solely create the cartridge on his own, it was his leadership and his depth of knowledge that allowed an entire team see the vision through to practicality.

Steve Jobs was admittedly never an engineer, but his vision and understanding of consumer electronics allowed him to make history with a revolutionary line of products. And therefore, Steve Jobs is the father of the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and many more Apple products.

Jerry Lawson was actually an engineer, and he also had a vast understanding of how to make a product practical for everyday use. And while it may be factually incorrect to say that he was the creator of the video game cartridge, it’s completely fair to say that he was the visionary behind the Channel F console and its shiny yellow video game cartridge.

But if you go deep enough down the Jerry Lawson rabbit-hole online, you’ll begin to see groups of toxic naysayers trying to diminish Jerry’s credit because of technicalities. Yet, Steve Jobs and other great visionaries never receive the same vitriol for their efforts after death.

In Raising the Game, you’ll hear an in-depth (and accurate) telling of how the Fairchild Channel F, it’s 6-axis controller and the game cartridges were manufactured. We went as far as to interview the people who were involved in the project. They all shared their take on Jerry and the creation of the console. This includes: Ron Smith (Fairchild engineer), Nick Talesfore (Fairchild industrial desginer) and Al Alcorn (the creator of Pong and former Atari developer).

Nobody can give you a better take on Jerry’s involvement than the people who were around during that time. And it was a pleasure to learn new history about the gaming industry as we interviewed these legends.

Jerry Lawson is the reason we have a pause button

When the Fairchild Channel F console is mentioned, people often think of the cartridge. That’s fair enough, because it was the most revolutionary feature at the time. It created an entirely new revenue stream for game developers. But people often forget the other little nuances that the Channel F shipped with.

One of the other groundbreaking features was the inclusion of a pause button. Today, it sounds like a simple feature, but back then it was a huge deal to be able to pause your gameplay and resume exactly where you left of. Features like this and the ability to play against the computer A.I were made possible thanks to the Fairchild’s F8 Microprocessor.

The F8 Microprocessor was the heart of the Channel F, and it made many of these game-changing features possible. The Atari VCS (which later changed to Atari 2600) hit the market a year after the Channel F and it included many of the Channel F’s features.

Atari shot to the top of the sales charts when it came out. The Atari had the advantage of being able to improve on everything the Channel F offered. Atari took over where the Channel F left off, and the rest is history.

Jerry Lawson paved the way for 3rd Party development on the Atari

Atari might have taken away the shine from Jerry’s Channel F system, but when Jerry Lawson left the Fairchild company, he would later play a significant role in the history of Atari. And the history of the video games market period.

You see, the Atari 2600 was a closed platform. And you could only develop for the console if Atari themselves granted you access to the system’s core technology. But a few engineers from Atari left and created the company we know today as Activision.

Activision began making games for the Atari 2600 and this led to Atari suing them. Atari claimed that Activision had stolen technology from the company.

During this lawsuit, Activision decided to enlist the help of Jerry Lawson. Jerry’s role was to prove that it was possible to reverse engineer the Atari 2600’s technology and create your very own video games for it. This task was a breeze for Jerry Lawson. He accurately broke down down how this was possible, going as far as to document the entire process.

When the lawsuit was settled, Jerry pretty much had an entire guide on how to develop games for the Atari console. People advised him to sell this guide and make thousands of dollars. But what did Jerry do? He published the guide under public domain so anyone could get a copy of it free of charge.

This move single-handedly birthed hundreds of independent game development companies around the world. Yes, Jerry Lawson’s generosity allowed independent video game development to become a viable thing. Raising the Game has a more detailed breakdown of this incredible story.

Jerry may have indirectly allowed the video game market crash to happen

What happens when hundreds of hungry programmers have the means to create non-stop video games? Well, eventually the market gets flooded. And game developers begin to publish any old junk that they think people will buy. And this begins to make the quality of video games tank, because people are more worried about making money quickly, than actually creating a good product for people to enjoy.

This greedy behavior is what caused the video games market to crash in the 80s. Jerry might have given up the blueprints for success, but as an independent developer himself, he wasn’t responsible for quality controlling the market.

The poor quality of games that were flooding the market made consumers lose interest in video games. And hundreds of companies folded as a result.

That was until a few Japanese companies began to rebuild the video games industry that we know today. This happened in the mid-to-late 80s. That was when Nintendo and Sega started a new revolution in the video games industry with the Famicom (Nintendo Entetainment System) and the Sega Master System.

Jerry’s name wasn’t on a single patent despite how key his role on the Channel F was

I’ve mentioned Steve Jobs a few times now, and I want to make it clear that I respect what Steve Jobs has done. He changed our entire world. Before the iPhone made it easy for the common person to use the internet, the world wide web was just a place for hobbyists.

And that’s why Steve Jobs name was added to over a dozen patents that he was never listed on before, after he unfortunately passed away. The man deserved to have his contributions recognized. And so does Jerry Lawson.

Like I said, you won’t find Jerry’s name on a single patent. How much of this is due to his skin colour, we’ll never know. But it’s too easy an assumption to make given that black people have historically been robbed of their credit for their creations.

While doing research for Raising the Game, we kept hearing non-stop about all of these incredible things that Jerry either created or revolutionized. And this made it even more disturbing for us when we learned that his name never appeared on a patent for any of these things.

Perhaps Jerry didn’t care about patents and recognition at all, but the patents for the Fairchild Channel F do exist and it seems as if Jerry’s name was purposely kept away from them. Knowing how black creators have been treated historically, and knowing how much it would have benefited future generations of black Americans to be made aware of the black geniuses before them, this was a hard pill for us to swallow.

I learned so much more about Jerry’s story during my time writing on Raising the Game. From his warming sense humor to the fact some very noteworthy people actively wanted nothing to do with him. But it’s better for you to learn some of these things in real time while listening to the documentary on Audible.

Listen to Raising the Game on Audible US link / UK link