Eugene Jarvis — Designer

United States · Born 1955 · Williams Electronics / Vid Kidz / Raw Thrills · Game Designer, Programmer

The designer of Defender and Robotron: 2084 — two of the defining arcade games of the early 1980s — who is still making arcade machines at Raw Thrills.

Eugene Jarvis was born in Palo Alto, California, on 27 January 1955 and studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, where he first played Spacewar!. After three days writing a COBOL compiler at Hewlett-Packard, he joined Atari to program its early microprocessor pinball tables, and when Atari's pinball division folded he moved to Chicago to do the same for Williams Electronics. His first video game, Defender (1980), made with Williams pinball designer Steve Ritchie, was a major hit. In February 1981 Jarvis and Larry DeMar founded Vid Kidz, which made the enhanced sequel Stargate (1981) and Robotron: 2084 (1982) for Williams. Robotron took about six months to build. Jarvis left Vid Kidz in 1984, earned an MBA from Stanford in 1986, and went on to design NARC (1989) and help create Smash TV (1990), then helped develop the texture-mapping hardware behind the Cruis'n racing series. He went on to lead the arcade studio Raw Thrills, whose games include The Fast and the Furious (2004). He received the AIAS Pioneer Award in 2013.