Eugene Jarvis at California Extreme 2006

Eugene Peyton 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. Image File history File links EugeneJarvis_cax2006_brighter. ... Image File history File links EugeneJarvis_cax2006_brighter. ... 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A game designer is a person who designs games. ... John Carmack is one of the most widely recognized and influential game programmers. ... This article is about the arcade game. ... For the concept Atari (当たり) in the board game of Go, see Atari (go term). ... This article is about computer and video games. ... Williams is a long-standing electronic gaming and amusement company based in Chicago, Illinois. ... Centipede by Atari is a typical example of a 1980s era arcade game. ... This page is about the arcade game Defender. ... Robotron: 2084 (often simply called Robotron) is an arcade game created in 1982 by the company Vid Kidz (Eugene Jarvis and Larry Demar) for Williams Electronics. ... 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... Cruisn USA is a 1994 arcade game by Midway Games. ... Midway Games (NYSE: MWY) is an American video game publisher known for such game series as Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam and Spy Hunter. ... See also 1990s, the band The 1990s decade refers to the years from 1990 to 1999, inclusive, sometimes informally including popular culture from the very late 1980s and from 2000 and beyond. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards and conform with our NPOV policy, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

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 Preparatory in San Jose. Jarvis's first encounter with computers came while he was in high school attending a one-day course on FORTRAN programming given by IBM. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Official language(s) English Capital Sacramento Largest city Los Angeles Area  Ranked 3rd  - Total 158,302 sq mi (410,000 km²)  - Width 250 miles (400 km)  - Length 770 miles (1,240 km)  - % water 4. ... Chess is an abstract strategy board game for two players. ... Bellarmine College Preparatory is an all-male private secondary school located in San Jose, California. ... Flag Seal Nickname: Capital of Silicon Valley Location Location of San Jose within Santa Clara County, California. ... A Lego RCX Computer is an example of an embedded computer used to control mechanical devices. ... FORTRAN[1] is a general-purpose[2], procedural[3], imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ... Computer programming (often simply programming or coding) is the craft of writing a set of commands or instructions that can later be compiled and/or interpreted and then inherently transformed to an executable that an electronic machine can execute or run. Programming requires mainly logic, but has elements of science... Big Blue redirects here. ...

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 BS in EECS in 1976 from Berkeley. In his last days before graduation, he interviewed with Atari, but did not receive a call back. Biochemistry is the chemistry of life. ... The University of California, Berkeley (also known as UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, and by other names, see below) is the oldest and flagship campus of the ten-campus University of California system. ... Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for legacy applications, typically bulk data processing (such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and bank transaction processing). ... This article is about the PDP-1 game. ... BS, Bs or bs is an abbreviation with multiple meanings, including: Bachelor of Science degree Backspace and the backspace control character in the C0 control code set Backstab, often used in video games with the phrase no bs (no backstabbing) to deter people who would attack their own allies Bahamas... EECS, pronounced eeks or sometimes eeh eeh cee ess, is an abbreviation for It is a designation used at some universities including MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. ... 1976 (MCMLXXVI) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ...

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 Park Ridge, IL, near Chicago, to continue programming pinball games. Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence and linguistics. ... The Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ), commonly known as HP, is one of the worlds largest information technology corporations. ... COBOL is a third-generation programming language, and one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. ... A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ... Microprocessors, including an Intel 80486DX2 and an Intel 80386 A microprocessor (abbreviated as µP or uP) is an electronic computer central processing unit (CPU) made from miniaturized transistors and other circuit elements on a single semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) (aka microchip or just chip). ... Chicago (officially named the City of Chicago) is the third largest city in the United States (after New York City and Los Angeles), with an official population of 2,896,016, as of the 2000 census. ...

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. The 1970s decade refers to the years from 1970 to 1979, inclusive. ... Space Invaders is an arcade video game designed by Toshihiro Nishikado in 1978. ... Steven S. Ritchie is an acclaimed pinball and video game designer. ... A side-scrolling game or side-scroller is a genre of video games in which the gameplay action is viewed from a side-view camera angle, and the onscreen characters generally move from the left side of the screen to the right in order to reach their goals. ... 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... In Space Invaders, the player controls the firing and horizontal position of the green cannon at the bottom, fending off constant attack by echelons of eponymous enemies. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the 1980s Stargate video game. ...

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. 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Blaster (J:ブラスター) is an arcade game developed by Eugene Jarvis and released by Williams in 1983. ... E.T. for the Atari 2600. ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Stanford redirects here. ... Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a tertiary degree in business management. ... 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... NARC is a 1988 arcade game by Williams Electronics. ... Smash TV is a 1990 arcade game created by Eugene Jarvis for Williams. ...

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. Virtual reality (VR) is a technology which allows a user to intereact with a computer-simulated environment. ... This article or section needs a complete rewrite for the reasons listed on the talk page. ...

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", introduced in Spring of 2004. The second game from his studio, The Fast and the Furious debuted in the Fall of 2004 at the same time as the Target: Terror Gold update kit. Shooter games cover a fairly broad spectrum of sub-genres that have the commonality of controlling a character who is usually armed with a firearm that can be freely aimed. ... The war on terrorism or war on terror (abbreviated in U.S. policy circles as GWOT for Global War on Terror) is an effort by the governments of the United States and its principal allies to destroy groups deemed to be terrorist (primarily radical Islamist organizations such as al-Qaeda... There are two films called The Fast and the Furious The Fast and the Furious (1954) The Fast and the Furious (2001) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

Jarvis is the only videogame designer to have his work featured on a U.S. Postage Stamp - two 80's era children are depicted playing Defender on the videogames stamp for the "Celebrate the Century" series.

References

• Bearns, Melissa H. "Master of the Game". The Medill News Wire. November 17, 1999. (Interview with Jarvis.)
• Hague, James. "Eugene Jarvis". Interview from James Hague's Halcyon Days. June 2002.
• Williams, Wayne Robert. "Interview with Eugene Jarvis (designer of Defender)". JoyStik (article hosted at GameArchive.com). September 1982.

17 November is also the name of a Marxist group in Greece, coinciding with the anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic uprising. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... For album titles with the same name, see 2002 (album). ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Eugene Jarvis

• Raw Thrills Inc.
• An Interview with the Creator Defender as shown on Gamer TV
• Eugene Jarvis rap sheet at MobyGames
• IGN interview
• The Dot Eaters entry on Jarvis, Defender and his other work at Williams
• Halcyon Days interview of Eugene Jarvis
• Full list of Eugene Jarvis games at Arcade-History.com
• Interview at DPerry.com
• COIN-OP TV interview