The Atari was launched in 1977. Looks like he was 5 years too late.
I assume '82 is the year the photo was taken.
I haven’t read his bio, but I knee-jerk get sad seeing these pioneers because whenever I read more about them they often include something like:
“Despite the huge popularity of Thing They Created, they received no royalties and died in poverty.”
The unsaid part is that someone else got rich off their genius. Every time, it makes me want to join the communist party.
Capitalism has taken so much from society that it is impossible to quantify.
Thank you Jerry. Your invention was a great source of joy to me as a kid.
Jerry was father to all of us who grew up in that era, in a small way 🙏
And as a direct result of his creation, he was also responsible for the art of blowing dust out of the cartridge so it would boot.
Hmmm… going by this video, the Fairchild games (and controllers) were impressively innovative for the day, considering that Pong-like games ruled at the time. Unfortunately, it appears that with the Atari 2600 being released less than a year later, Channel F’s thunder was essentially stolen, and rightly so because of the A2600’s superior complexity and innovaton. So close, and yet so far!
the A2600’s superior complexity
Now there’s a phrase that I didn’t expect to see. :-)
I do think that the console’s controllers look kind of interesting. I’ve never seen them before, sort of an alternate fork in console controller design that we didn’t go down. A handle with a six-degrees-of-freedom thumbstick on top.
Now there’s a phrase that I didn’t expect to see. :-)
I feel there’s a lot to talk about in that area. Not only were the A2600 games clearly superior to the Fairchild’s right off the bat, but the programmers kept pushing the envelope year after year with all kinds of little tricks & techniques.
Also, it’s kind of mind-blowing to me how Mattel began work on the Intellivision as early as 1975, eventually got it out the door with significantly superior hardware specs in 1979, yet kind of fumbled the ball when it came to the controllers, and specifically failed when it came to their library of games and the ‘fun-factor.’
Legendary games like Adventure could have been topped so easily on the Intellivision, yet they somehow missed the opportunity. Or a simple yet brilliant game like “Warlords” was somehow more fun than anything ever produced on the INTV, far as I know. How could that happen?
Then again, Atari sort of failed in similar fashion in preparing to win the next round of the console wars, being utterly blown out of the water by the Nintendo NES a whole 8yrs after the A2600 first came out. That pretty much killed off their whole console line, with the “Lynx” being their last gasp IIRC.
Haha, sorry for the ramble. Just chatty at the moment…
A great man. May he rest in peace.
I’ll always update posts about Jerry Lawson. The Fairchild Channel F was truly revolutionary.
I feel bad for the mother who had to birth it.
