Eugene Peyton Jarvis is an American game designer and video game programmer, known for producing pinball machines for Williams Electronics and video games for Atari. Most notable among his works are the seminal arcade video games Defender and Robotron: 2084 in the early 1980s, and the Cruis'n series of racing games for Nintendo in the 1990s. He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills. In 2008, Eugene Jarvis was named the first Game Designer in Residence by DePaul University's Game Development program. His family owns the Jarvis Wines company in Napa, California.

In 2009, he was chosen by IGN as one of the top 100 game creators of all time.

Early life and education

Jarvis was born in Palo Alto, California and grew up in Menlo Park. He has an older sister, Diane, and a younger sister, Helen. His first game was chess, which he played as a young child; he 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.

Jarvis originally intended to become a biochemist but decided on studying computers instead. He received his B.S. in EECS in 1976 from Berkeley. In his last days before graduation, he interviewed with Atari, but did not receive a call back. Atari's pinball development branch failed a few years later, so he moved to Chicago to continue programming pinball games for Williams Electronics.

Video arcade games

As Jarvis worked on pinball games at Williams in the late 1970s, Space Invaders was released, sparking great interest in microprocessor-based 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, becoming one of the highest grossing video games from the golden age of arcade games. He then designed Blaster, a sort-of Robotron sequel set in 2085 — after the robots destroyed humanity — but with different, 3D gameplay. Though a marvel to look at, Blaster was not quite as successful or remembered as his previous video games.

He 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 2004. The second game from his studio, The Fast and the Furious debuted that fall along with the Target: Terror update kit. Since the release of Target Terror, the company has experienced strong growth, developing or releasing titles including Nicktoons Nitro, Guitar Hero Arcade, H2Overdrive, the Big Buck series of games and Jurassic Park Arcade among others.

In 2006, Raw Thrills purchased game developer Play Mechanix which is led by his friend George Petro. Together the two companies have developed arcade and video redemption games for ICE and Bandai Namco Amusements America.

In 2008, Jarvis was named DePaul University's first Game Designer in Residence. and he received the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Pioneer Award in 2013.

Jarvis is the only video game designer to have his work featured on a U.S. postage stamp two 1980's era children are depicted playing Defender on the video games stamp for the "Celebrate the Century" series. He also appeared in a cameo on the TV series NewsRadio (in the 3rd-season episode "Arcade") as "Delivery Man #3", a character who delivers a distracting arcade video game machine to the office. That arcade game is his own creation Stargate, which within the episode is called Stargate Defender and is described as being about "saving the humanoids" while avoiding the "Yllabian Space Guppies".

In 2018, Defender was included in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition, that was curated by Jon Cates.

In 2022, Jarvis and his wife, Sasha Gerritson, gifted DePaul the university's largest ever gift, in support of the institution's College of Computing and Digital Media. In recognition of the couple's generosity and dedicated leadership, the college has been renamed the Eugene P. Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media.

Games

Pinball

Atari

  • Time 2000
  • Airborne Avenger
  • Superman

Williams

  • Laser Ball
  • Firepower
  • Space Shuttle
  • High Speed
  • F-14 Tomcat

Video games

  • Defender
  • Stargate
  • Robotron: 2084
  • Blaster
  • NARC
  • Smash TV
  • Total Carnage
  • Cruis'n series
  • Target: Terror
  • The Fast and the Furious
  • The Fast and the Furious: Drift
  • Nex Machina

Further reading

  • Bearns, Melissa H. . The Medill News Wire. November 17, 1999. (Interview with Jarvis.)
  • Williams, Wayne Robert.

References

  • Full list of Eugene Jarvis games at Arcade-History.com