Early home consoles played exactly one game forever. Jerry Lawson shattered that limitation. This episode tells the story of the Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised engineer who fixed dangerous vacuum tube televisions as a teenager, earned a ham radio license at 13, joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1970, and built a microprocessor-driven arcade game called Demolition Derby in his garage as a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.

We break down how Lawson's team turned Alpex's raw removable ROM concept into the Fairchild Channel F in 1976, engineering a plastic cartridge shell that grounded static electricity before it could fry the console, and adding the first pause button and an eight-way joystick. We also cover the Channel F's commercial defeat by the Atari 2600, Lawson's pragmatic founding of Videosoft to build games for his rival's machine, h ...