Ed Smith, Video Game Pioneer – Black History Month 2024 #BlackHistoryMonth
Today we celebrate video game pioneer Ed Smith! Here’s more from Fast Company:
Thirty-seven years ago, New York-based APF Electronics, Inc. released The Imagination Machine, a hybrid video game console and personal computer designed to make a consumer’s first experience with computing as painless and inexpensive as possible.
APF’s playful computer (and its game console, the MP1000) never rivaled the impact of products from Apple or Atari, but they remain historically important because of the man who cocreated them: Ed Smith, one of the first African-American electronics engineers in the video game industry. During a time when black Americans struggled for social justice, Manhattan-based APF hired Smith to design the core element of its future electronics business.
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“Every other day I would take a console back home to the neighborhood and give it to someone in the projects that I lived in,” recalls Smith, who lived in Flatbush. “So, when I was done, there were probably a good 50 people that I knew in the projects playing the MP1000.” Smith, who considered his unsanctioned experiment not only a charitable exercise but part of play-testing, became impressed with the reaction he witnessed.
“They didn’t know what to expect,” says Smith, “But once they got it in front of them, it was all intuitive. They loved it. It was a chance to interact with someone else in the apartment versus going outside and doing something crazy. So a lot of times, people would play the video games for hours in the day, like they do today, and not be on the street.”
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