The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.
Game designer Eugene Jarvis created seminal arcade video games from the 1980s and 1990s, mostly for Williams and Midway. They included
Defender,
Robotron 2084,
N.A.R.C.,
Smash TV, and the
Cruis'n trilogy of arcade games.
Jarvis got his first programming chops, working for
Atari, where he programmed some of their pinball games, including Steve Ritchie's
Airborne Avenger and
Superman, the latter title was was released after Ritchie left Atari to join Williams. Eventually, Jarvis joined Williams in 1979, where he programmed Ritchie's 1980 hit pinball game,
Firepower, the first solid-state electronic pinball game to feature multi-ball.
Jarvis' games have almost always been about providing against-all-odds gameplay that puts the player into a situation made
nearly impossible to overcome. His philosophy about gameplay was to make a game that kicks the player's ass and in doing so makes the players angry enough to get even with
that cheap CPU. He was the first video game creator, or one of the first, to espouse this philosophy. That is what made his games popular and profitable. It helps that his games were pretty violent.
He always felt that CPU opponents should provide a challenge and be interesting. He felt that
Space Invaders was too easy because it was just aliens marching downward and shooting as they move. They had a lack of individuality that should make them more interesting. He disliked the
Artificial Stupidity in
Space Invaders.
Robotron best demonstrates his idea of gameplay: Each object has not only a different look but also different behaviors.
Jarvis is busy running his own arcade game developer outfit,
Raw Thrills
, best known for making
Target Terror, the
Fast and the Furious arcade game series, and
Big Buck Hunter Pro. Other Raw Thrills games include
Guitar Hero Arcade,
an arcade-ified version of
Guitar Hero III, and
H2Overdrive, a boat racer developed by the same guys behind the classic arcade racer
Hydro Thunder. They also made a
Light Gun shoot-em-up based on
Terminator: Salvation that managed to avoid the trap of
The Problem with Licensed Games that the console game based on the film fell into.
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