Gerald Lawson, a largely self-taught engineer who became a pioneer in electronic video entertainment, creating the first home video game system with interchangeable game cartridges, died Saturday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Santa Clara, Calif.

The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Catherine.

Before disc-based systems like PlayStation, Xbox and Wii transformed the video game industry, before techno-diversions like Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL and even before Pac-Man and Donkey Kong became the obsession of millions of electronic gamers, it was Lawson who first made it possible to play a variety of video games at home.

In the mid-1970s, he was director of engineering and marketing for the newly formed video game division of Fair-child Semiconductor, and it was under his direction that the division brought to market in 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, a home console that allowed users to play different games contained on removable cartridges. Until then, home video game systems could play only games that were built into the machines themselves. Lawson’s ideas anticipated — if they did not entirely enable — a colossal international business.

In March, Lawson was honored for his innovative work by the International Game Developers Association, an overdue acknowledgment for an unfamiliar contributor to the technological transformation that has changed how people live.

“He’s absolutely a pioneer,” Allan Alcorn, a creator of the granddaddy of video games, Pong, said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News in March. “When you do something for the first time, there is nothing to copy.”

Alcorn was the first design engineer at Atari, whose own cartridge console eventually dominated the home video game market.

At 6 feet 6 inches and well over 250 pounds, Lawson cut an imposing figure. A modest man but a straight talker who was known to one and all as Jerry, he was among only a handful of black engineers in the world of electronics in general and electronic gaming in particular.

Gerald Anderson Lawson was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1940, and grew up mostly in Queens. His parents encouraged his intellectual pursuits.

As a boy, he pursued a number of scientific interests, ham radio and chemistry among them. As a teenager, he earned money repairing television sets. In the early 1970s, he started at Fairchild in Silicon Valley as a roving design consultant.