As to who Jerry Lawson was, apparently he invented the “Fairchild Channel F” console system, which I know literally nothing about, but it looks like it paved the way for stuff like the SNES, and similar later devices…
Anyway, the mini-games within the doodle look, to me, like something off my old Gameboy Color, just with shittier graphics so I don’t know how “period accurate” they are, but hey, they’re fun, even if the mobile UI is, uhh, far from perfect…
If you’re into games, it’s worth a look.
And yes, being Google, Lawson is being celebrated because he was fat and black, rather than for any other reason, by the looks, lol… But hey, wokeness aside, at least the Doodle is actually fun this time!
More like paved the way for this, as it used cartridges, too. Yeah, I don't even remember the Fairchild, or the Magnavox of the 70s; I was 9 or 10 by the time anything computer/video-game related came onto my radar (my mom's work switching over from typewriters to terminals and Space Invaders appearing at the local mall. Computers in schools? Not until I was leaving high school, and all my math and accounting teachers absolutely hated and banned calculators.). The pre-Atari stuff would have been expensive af, and can count basically as that good but failed and mostly forgotten attempt that always precedes success (usually by someone else.) And yeah, I had a 2600, but not until 79 or 80. What carried that thing was the novelty of being able to control actual things on a TV screen.
Ah yes, I forgot about the Atari! Long before my time, I must admit, lol...
Yeah, the graphics in these doodle games are, uhh, inauthentic at best, but I think the general idea is to show what it sort of led to (in the sense, as you say, of cartridge games and consoles), rather than what he was actually designing...
But yeh, I grew up a couple of decades later, so we had "school computers", initially, and then shared laptops (early Macbooks), and then, later, our own laptops for class, plus graphics calculators... But this was at a private school, so... (Too) Well-resourced, obviously, by comparison to public school. Like, they had money to burn, so they could afford shit like that.
Kind of sad, really. When I was in primary school, they really put effort into teaching handwriting and long arithmetic and stuff... By the time I was in high school, they sort of just... Gave up, sadly. So I get what you're saying, there, even if it was much more ubiquitous by my time...
Earliest computer I had was a Windows 95. That was a fun, utilitarian thing. Never got to have a console of my own (was allowed to borrow my cousins PS1, for brief periods) - my parents were so restrictive they even took away the handheld consoles given to me by others (a Gameboy Color, and later an "Advance") - some of that stuff I still haven't found, more than a decade later, as an adult, sadly...
So yeah, I didn't have that much experience of "gaming", growing up. Less so than others around me, at least!
I don't think I turned out any better, or happier, or really anything, for being deprived of that, though, lol. Realistically probably all it achieved was to make me resent them more, later on, heh.
As to who Jerry Lawson was, apparently he invented the “Fairchild Channel F” console system, which I know literally nothing about, but it looks like it paved the way for stuff like the SNES, and similar later devices…
Anyway, the mini-games within the doodle look, to me, like something off my old Gameboy Color, just with shittier graphics so I don’t know how “period accurate” they are, but hey, they’re fun, even if the mobile UI is, uhh, far from perfect…
If you’re into games, it’s worth a look.
And yes, being Google, Lawson is being celebrated because he was fat and black, rather than for any other reason, by the looks, lol… But hey, wokeness aside, at least the Doodle is actually fun this time!
More like paved the way for this, as it used cartridges, too. Yeah, I don't even remember the Fairchild, or the Magnavox of the 70s; I was 9 or 10 by the time anything computer/video-game related came onto my radar (my mom's work switching over from typewriters to terminals and Space Invaders appearing at the local mall. Computers in schools? Not until I was leaving high school, and all my math and accounting teachers absolutely hated and banned calculators.). The pre-Atari stuff would have been expensive af, and can count basically as that good but failed and mostly forgotten attempt that always precedes success (usually by someone else.) And yeah, I had a 2600, but not until 79 or 80. What carried that thing was the novelty of being able to control actual things on a TV screen.
Ah yes, I forgot about the Atari! Long before my time, I must admit, lol...
Yeah, the graphics in these doodle games are, uhh, inauthentic at best, but I think the general idea is to show what it sort of led to (in the sense, as you say, of cartridge games and consoles), rather than what he was actually designing...
But yeh, I grew up a couple of decades later, so we had "school computers", initially, and then shared laptops (early Macbooks), and then, later, our own laptops for class, plus graphics calculators... But this was at a private school, so... (Too) Well-resourced, obviously, by comparison to public school. Like, they had money to burn, so they could afford shit like that.
Kind of sad, really. When I was in primary school, they really put effort into teaching handwriting and long arithmetic and stuff... By the time I was in high school, they sort of just... Gave up, sadly. So I get what you're saying, there, even if it was much more ubiquitous by my time...
Earliest computer I had was a Windows 95. That was a fun, utilitarian thing. Never got to have a console of my own (was allowed to borrow my cousins PS1, for brief periods) - my parents were so restrictive they even took away the handheld consoles given to me by others (a Gameboy Color, and later an "Advance") - some of that stuff I still haven't found, more than a decade later, as an adult, sadly...
So yeah, I didn't have that much experience of "gaming", growing up. Less so than others around me, at least!
I don't think I turned out any better, or happier, or really anything, for being deprived of that, though, lol. Realistically probably all it achieved was to make me resent them more, later on, heh.