Eugene Jarvis | Code Like It's 198x

In 1982 Joystik magazine sat down with a 27-year-old who already had three hits to his name: Defender, Stargate and Robotron: 2084. Eugene Jarvis was, the magazine said, a rare thing, “both a creative game designer and a creative computer programmer”. His games were fast, crowded and hard, and he meant them to be. “I’m an action player,” he said. “I like to be aggressive. I don’t like to be on the run.” More than forty years later he was still making arcade machines, at a company he founded when most of the American arcade business had given up.

Fast facts

Born: 1955, in California.
Education: electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Companies: Atari (pinball), Williams Electronics, Vid Kidz, Williams and Midway again, Raw Thrills.
Key games: Defender (1981), Stargate (1981), Robotron: 2084 (1982), Blaster (1983), NARC, Smash TV (1990), the Cruis’n series.

Pinball first

Jarvis planned to be a biochemist. “I wanted to cure, like, death!” he told Retro Gamer. At school he had learned FORTRAN on an IBM computer behind glass, and written a chess program. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley instead, and in 1976 joined Atari’s pinball division in California, next door to the video game department then busy with Breakout.

Pinball tables had become computers too, and Jarvis wrote their programs. At Atari he worked on The Atarians, Time 2000 and Airborne Avenger, the last with the designer Steve Ritchie, and learned about electronic sound synthesis on the way. When Atari’s pinball division closed he moved to Williams, the Chicago pinball maker, where his tables included Firepower.

Defender

Williams was thinking about video games, and Jarvis, who had decided after playing Space Invaders that he wanted to make them, pushed to be given one. The result, Defender, is told in full in its own entry. It was Steve Ritchie who suggested flying over a planet; Jarvis turned that into a ship flying left and right over a scrolling world. Sam Dicker, whom Jarvis had hired, made the explosions that scattered every pixel of a destroyed ship across the screen, and Larry DeMar wrote the attract mode on the night before the game’s first show. Joystik called it “the biggest success of 1981”.

Success brought growth, and Jarvis did not like what came with it. In his telling, Williams decided that if two people could produce a hit, forty could produce more, and the bureaucracy that followed drove him out. He and DeMar left to form their own company, Vid Kidz, in Chicago. Its games were built and sold by Williams.

Vid Kidz

Williams wanted a Defender sequel within four months, and Vid Kidz wrote it under contract. To get the most from a $50,000 Motorola development system, Jarvis programmed by day and DeMar by night. Stargate added an “Inviso” button and a Stargate that let expert players carrying rescued humanoids skip whole levels. Jarvis thought it “the better game”. Williams later renamed it Defender II after a trademark dispute.

Robotron: 2084 came next, in 1982. Jarvis described the aim as taking Space Invaders “into two dimensions”: one screen, the player in the middle and enemies pouring in from every side. The controls came partly from frustration. He loved Stern’s Berzerk but hated standing still to shoot, and after a car accident that shattered his right hand he found the game almost impossible to play. The answer was two joysticks, one to move and one to fire. According to Jarvis, a 1 MHz graphics chip and “very clever machine code and micro code” let the game handle about 150 enemies at once, while the sound came from a single channel shared out by priority. “You cannot play a casual game of Robotron,” he said. “It demands your everything.”

The last Vid Kidz game, Blaster (1983), tried to fake 3D on Robotron’s hardware with scaled images drawn by hand, as many as 32 sizes of each object. Only about 1,000 cabinets were made, and the home version died with Atari’s collapse.

Through 1982 Jarvis also wrote a coin-op review column, “Coin-Op Shop”, for the American magazine Video Games, which introduced him as “everyone’s favorite game designer”. He was not gentle. When he wrote that Namco’s Dig Dug resembled Pac-Man, a reader wrote in to argue.

Back at Williams

The industry crash of the mid-1980s took Jarvis out of games for several years, which he spent studying business and computer science at Stanford. Williams brought him back in 1987. There he made NARC, an anti-drug shoot-‘em-up with digitised graphics that Sinclair User singled out as the one surprise among the video games at that year’s American operators’ show. Jarvis described it as “Rambo in the Hood”. “Why shouldn’t games be based on politics?” he said later. “I did have really strong feelings regarding the devastating effect that drugs were having on society.”

Smash TV (1990), made with the programmer Mark Turmell, was Robotron’s twin-stick play wrapped in a satire of television game shows, with borrowings from RoboCop and The Running Man. It was Turmell’s first coin-op game and the artist John Tobias’s first video game. The first test, in a Chicago arcade, had only three waves finished. “The players mobbed it right away,” Jarvis recalled; two players reached the third wave, which never ended, and the team went out for pizza rather than be there when they found out. The finished game promised hidden “Pleasure Domes” for players who collected enough keys. The team had run out of time to build them, and the first release had none. “It was a total scam to keep players going for some impossible goal,” Jarvis admitted. About six months later a new release added them.

In the 1990s he moved into 3D and driving. Cruis’n USA (1994), a coast-to-coast race across the United States, came from Williams (WMS Industries), with a version promised for Nintendo’s Ultra 64 console; Cruis’n World and Cruis’n Exotica followed. Exotica was his last game for Midway, by then part of the Williams group.

Raw Thrills

In 2000, with things at Midway “intolerable” in his word, younger colleagues persuaded Jarvis to start again. His new company, Raw Thrills, kept making arcade machines when most American companies had stopped. Its games included the gun game Target: Terror and The Fast and the Furious, which Taito showed at Japan’s AOU trade show in 2005, and SuperBikes. In 2007 Edge described Raw Thrills as “one of arcade gaming’s most powerful new developers” and summed up Jarvis’s approach as “easy to learn, tough to master”.

Raw Thrills also built cabinets for others. In 2007 Jarvis asked Steve Ranck, who had made Hydro Thunder at Midway, whether he wanted to make a sequel; Ranck set up Specular Interactive, whose games, beginning with H2Overdrive (2009), came out through Raw Thrills. Their Batman driving game, shown at the end of 2013, had a towering bat emblem and 500 lights on its cabinet. Raw Thrills also sold the Big Buck hunting games with Play Mechanix.

The International Game Developers Association gave Jarvis a lifetime achievement award, which he collected in the suit he had worn to Defender’s launch. He has always been clear about what computers are for: “The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.”

Sources

Joystik, vol. 1 no. 1, September 1982, “Innerview: Eugene Jarvis”, by Wayne Robert Williams: his age, Berkeley degree, Atari and Williams, Vid Kidz in Chicago, “both a creative game designer and a creative computer programmer”, “I’m an action player”, Steve Ritchie’s flying idea, “the biggest success of 1981”.
Retro Gamer, issue 24, 2006, pp. 78–80, “Desert Island Disks: Eugene Jarvis”: birth in California and the Mozart birthday, the biochemistry plan, FORTRAN and chess, Atari’s pinball division in 1976 and its three tables, Airborne Avenger with Ritchie, sound synthesis, Williams, Sam Dicker, Larry DeMar and the attract mode, Williams’s growth and Vid Kidz, Stargate and the development system, Defender II, Robotron’s controls and the car accident, Blaster and its 1,000 cabinets, Stanford and the return to Williams in 1987, NARC and the quotations, the Cruis’n games and Exotica as his last Midway game, Raw Thrills in 2000, the lifetime achievement award, “the only legitimate use of a computer is to play games”.
Retro Gamer: The Ultimate Retro Companion, vol. 2 (Imagine, 2008), p. 42, “The Making of Robotron: 2084”: Space Invaders “into two dimensions”, about 150 enemies, the 1 MHz graphics processor, the single sound channel, Berzerk and the injured hand, “it demands your everything”.
Retro Gamer, issue 35, 2007, from p. 60, “The Making of Smash TV”: Mark Turmell’s first coin-op game and John Tobias’s first video game, the first test in Chicago, the Pleasure Domes and the later release, RoboCop and The Running Man.
Edge, issue 217, August 2010: Jarvis decided to make video games after playing Space Invaders.
Video Games (Pumpkin Press), vol. 1 no. 2, October 1982, p. 60, “Picks & Pans for an Otherwise Dull Season”, by Eugene Jarvis; contents page (“everyone’s favorite game designer”). Vol. 1 no. 3, December 1982, p. 62: his column and biography (Firepower, Superman and The Atarians). Vol. 1 no. 4, January 1983: readers’ letters about his Dig Dug review.
Leisure Line, August 1990: arcade chart with Smash TV (Williams).
Sinclair User, issue 83, February 1989: coin-op report from the AMOA show in Chicago, NARC from Williams as the surprise of the show.
Nintendo Power, issue 65, October 1994: Cruis’n USA from Williams (WMS Industries), and the Ultra 64 version.
Edge, issue 148, April 2005: Taito showing Raw Thrills’ Target Terror and The Fast and the Furious at the AOU show.
Edge, issue 181, November 2007: arcade feature quoting Jarvis as founder of Raw Thrills, “one of arcade gaming’s most powerful new developers”, “easy to learn, tough to master”, SuperBikes.
Edge, issue 241, June 2012, Specular Interactive studio profile: Ranck on Jarvis’s call in 2007, H2Overdrive and Raw Thrills’ cabinets. Edge, issue 223, January 2011: H2Overdrive (Raw Thrills, 2009).
Edge, issue 259, November 2013 (Big Buck HD, Raw Thrills/Play Mechanix) and issue 262, January 2014 (Batman, Raw Thrills/Specular Interactive).
“Eugene Jarvis”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): date and place of birth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Jarvis