Gaming pioneer passes away

I met Jerry several times at the Game Developers conferences. He was a very cool guy. He had some amazing stories about the early days of the video game industry. He helped to develop the Fairchild Joystick which to this day I think is the best joystick ever developed. It had 6 axis of motion (left, right, forward, backward, up and down) + twisting right & left. When I asked him about the joystick, he said "nobody had ever built a joystick, so we weren't constrained by what anybody else had done."

We had a Fairchild game system when I was a kid. I bugged my parents for one the Christmas they came out and my Dad and I hit every Target, Dayton's, Donaldson's and Sears store in Minneapolis until we found one. It took two days of driving around with my mother sitting at home calling stores and then we would call home every hour to see if she had found any. Once we got it home, we were all so amazed watching those huge pixels moving across the screen. I don't think the game ever got shut off the first month we had it. My father finally went out and bought a small used TV at a TV repair shop for the game so he could have his TV back :).

Jerry you will be missed.

ken
 
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