Bellamy leads game industry trade group
Bellamy wants to change that obscurity. "I'm not ready to roll credits on Jerry Lawson," said the Harvard-trained engineer in one of the more poignant segments of the documentary.
The broadcast premiere of A Great Day in Gaming: From Queens to Silicon Valley: The Gerald A. Lawson Story occurs on Wednesday, Feb. 15 at 9 p.m. on KMTP-32 in the nine-county Bay Area viewing market.
The selectee to the 12th annual 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology shares iconic status with Lawson in the industry as one of the developers of a product most people are familiar with -- Madden Football, while working at EA Sports.
Bellamy is now the first executive director of the International Game Developers Association, selected just months after being elected chairman of the board of the most important trade association in the $23 billion industry.
"I wanted to be you, even though I didn't even know you existed," Bellamy told Lawson during their first and only meeting at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco earlier this year. Lawson would pass just weeks later, albeit pleased to have seen dozens of African-American game professionals having followed in his footsteps like Bellamy.
In its 15th year, the International Game Developers Association is the largest non-profit membership organization serving individuals who create video games.
When tapped for the IGDA board, Bellamy was senior producer of Emerging Media yU&Co, after working for MTV Networks, EA, THQ and Z-Axis.
A Great Day in Gaming: From Queens to Silicon Valley: The Gerald A. Lawson Story, a documentary about the fateful meeting of Lawson with his successors in the gaming industry last March, is available for exhibition around the country. Future sites include the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland in February.
