RanHakubi: A direct line can be drawn between Mr. Lawson's work and video games as we know them today.

I'm sorry history forgot your name sir, but hopefully it will start to remember it as we continue to enjoy the fruits of your legacy. Every kid that blew in a cartridge, lost hours in front of their TV's, and now like me, fondly remembers sliding that game into their system and being blown away by what was in front of them has you to thank. Rest well, Mr. Trailblazer.

Indeed.  I didn't have a Channel F (didn't even know they existed by the early 80s) but I did have a Coleco Gemini as my first game system (Coleco's Atari VCS clone), and I've been a total geek gamer ever since.  (Well, I went to arcades prior to getting my first game system so I was gaming before that Gemini, but being able to play those games in my own home was just the pinnacle of awesome to me back then.)

Technically however, the first game with interchangeable cartridges was the Magnavox Odyssey -- the original Ralph Baer "brown box" from 1972.  I say technically because those cartridges didn't actually contain any logic, discrete or otherwise; they were just bare boards with traces that, when plugged in, completed certain circuits along the edge connector that activated a game that was already inside the machine.  You could literally have made the cartridges at home if you knew which circuits to complete.  But the Channel F was the first game system with interchangeable cartridges where the game logic was in the cartridges on an IC.

Nevertheless, more people really should know Gerald Lawson's name.  Not only was he the OG father of home cartridge gaming, he was the first black father of gaming, and inspired -- and continues to inspire -- generations of gamers and engineers alike.  He really needs to be recognized more widely as the legend that he is in the pantheon of gaming gods.

LeftisRightisWrong: It feels like we missed a window for flash carts to come back. With how big modern games are, and how great solid state memory is nowadays, a game could come on it's own microsd card and not take up system storage.

They did -- for PDAs and some handhelds.  But they were never cheap enough to mass market for mainstream systems -- not when compared to optical media, which cost pennies to a buck or two per disc.  Those handhelds that used them did so because their form factor made any other type of interchangeable system prohibitive to impossible.  (Sony PSP had its own proprietary optical media because -- well, it's Sony, they helped invent optical media in the first place.)

Unscratchable_Itch: Wow. How is it that with all the classic video game videos and documentaries I've watched, and articles I've read, that I've never heard of this guy? Well, the names of a lot of those guys were never well known, but still. I guess that's why they started putting Easter eggs featuring their names in the games they built.

It started with Atari.  Warner Communications, who bought Atari from Nolan Bushnell (and subsequently ousted him and banned him from developing games for Atari systems), under the leadership of one Ray Kassar, refused to give Atari's engineers/developers individual credit for anything they wrote, as Kassar believed it should all be simply credited to Atari as a whole, since it was their IP, after all.  This was A) What led to Warren Robinette to create the first easter egg in Adventure, and B) What led to the inevitable exodus of talent from Atari to form other companies.  Activision's founders in particular hated not getting individual credit so much that, after they fled to form Atari, they marketed their games specifically touting the names of the engineers that wrote them in the ads and on the boxes.  Many of the boxes even included pictures of them.

Jerry Lawson deserves a full length documentary.

Absolutely.  I'd watch that.