Eugene Jarvis
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Eugene Jarvis (born 1955) is a game designer and programmer, producing pinball machines for Atari and video games for Williams Electronics. Most notable amongst his work are the seminal arcade video games Defender and Robotron: 2084 in the early 1980s, and the Cruis'n series of driving games for Midway Games in the 1990s. He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills Inc.
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Biography
Before Defender
Eugene Jarvis was born in Palo Alto, California in 1955. His first game was chess, which he played as a young child and was one of the best players at Bellarmine College Prep (high school) in San Jose. He associated with the geeks at Bellarmine and was taking advanced math classes at Santa Clara University. Jarvis's first encounter with computers came while he was in high school attending a one-day course on FORTRAN programming given by IBM.
Jarvis originally intended to become a biochemist but decided on studying computers instead. At the University of California, Berkeley, Jarvis did FORTRAN programming on mainframes. At Berkeley he got his first taste of computer gaming, playing Space War in the basement of the physics lab. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1976 from Berkeley. In his last days before graduation, he interviewed with Atari, but did not receive a call back.
Having an interest in natural language processing, he was hired by Hewlett Packard to help create a COBOL compiler. He disliked the bored culture at HP and quit after only three days into the six-year project. That same day Atari finally called him back, three months late, interested in hiring him. He joined them and started programming some of the first pinball games that used microprocessors. Atari's pinball development branch failed a few years later, so he moved to Williams in Chicago to continue programming pinball games.
Video arcade games
As Jarvis worked on pinball games at Williams in the late 1970s, Space Invaders was released, sparking great interest in microprocessor video games. Jarvis wanted to try making a video game. When thinking of design ideas with famed pinball designer Steve Ritchie, they developed the concept for Defender — a side-scroller with the player flying over the surface of a planet. Defender (1980) was Jarvis's first video game and turned out to be a huge hit, helping kick off the golden age of arcade games and eventually becoming one of the highest grossing video games ever. Williams expanded greatly with the success of Defender, but Jarvis left to found an independent game development firm called Vid Kidz with Larry DeMar in February 1981. After four months of tag-team programming between DeMar and Jarvis, they produced Vid Kidz's first game: Stargate (1981), an enhanced sequel to Defender that they sold to Williams.
Jarvis's next hit with Vid Kidz was the high-action game Robotron, which was produced by Williams in 1982. He then designed Blaster, a sort-of Robotron sequel set in 2085 — after the robots destroyed humanity — but with different gameplay. Blaster was not quite as successful or remembered as his previous video games. The video game crash of 1983 hit Williams hard, forcing them to cut back and reverting to much of their pre-Defender business. Jarvis left Vid Kidz in 1984 to attend Stanford University, where he gained an MBA in 1986. He continued making games, designing Narc (1989) and helping develop Smash TV (1990), which drew comparisons to Robotron.
The next big leap for Jarvis was 3D. He had been interested in virtual reality since attending Berkeley in the 1970s. He and a group of others left Midway (which Williams had purchased in 1988) to experiment with VR, but disappointingly came to the realization that VR headsets were not catching on. They did find potential in multi-screen cockpit simulators though. He helped create 3D texture mapping hardware which ended up being used in his Cruis'n series of games. The hardware was also licensed to Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. The Cruis'n series is estimated to have grossed $2–4 billion USD.
He now works for his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc., and his more recent work has returned him to the coin-op arcade game world with Target: Terror, a first-person perspective shooting game based on the "war on terror".
References
- Bearns, Melissa H. "Master of the Game (http://www.melissabearns.com/games.html)". The Medill News Wire. November 17, 1999. (Interview with Jarvis.)
- Hague, James. "Eugene Jarvis (http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/JARVIS.HTM)". Interview from James Hague's Halcyon Days. June 2002.
- Williams, Wayne Robert. "Interview with Eugene Jarvis (designer of Defender) (http://www.gamearchive.com/General/Articles/ClassicNews/1982/JoystikJarvis1.htm)". JoyStik (article hosted at GameArchive.com (http://www.gamearchive.com/)). September 1982.
External links
- Raw Thrills Inc. (http://www.rawthrills.com)
- Eugene Jarvis rap sheet at MobyGames (http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId=13746/)