Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. How the Father of the Video Game Cartridge became a game-changer in Silicon Valley.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

When you think of the early days of video games, this might not be the first brand that comes to mind.

Channel F, the one with all the fun, the Fairchild Video Entertainment System at your larger

JC Penny. The Fairchild Channel F was released in 1976 before the more famous Atari released

its console. It was the first system to use individual game cartridges, thanks in large part

to Jerry Lawson, a black engineer at Fairchild. Anthony Frazier is CEO of ABF Creative and host

of a podcast about Jerry Lawson called Raising the Game. He was actually a salesman, a glorified

salesman at first, a Fairchild. He would go around in a van and kind of do repairs and kind of do

sales pitches to other companies to get them to buy semiconductors and things that at nature.

One day, he actually got his hands on the F8 microprocessor, which is a microprocessor

at Fairchild, made at the time. He took it home, not with the company's permission, of course,

and he built the first demolition derby game in his garage. It worked really well. He

showed it all to a few people. He was even trying to sell it to a pizza shop. Then the word got back

to someone at Fairchild. He got called to the office and he thought he was going to lose his job.

And the executive said, no, we don't want to fire you. We want you to do this again.

What you've done. And so they said, Jerry, we want to promote you. We want you to lead the team

that creates a video game console for Fairchild.

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