Eugene Jarvis

Defender/Robotron/Stargate – how did you get those games to FEEL so right? Incredibly challenging, but not unplayable?
- It’s a process of successive refinement – like cooking a soup. You put a little pepper in, maybe add some salt, decide that’s too much salt... The difference is, with programming, it’s easy to pluck out an ingredient that doesn’t work and try something else. Defender was my first videogame, and, like any crazy kid who wants to design a game, I started out with unbelievable ambition. I wanted it to be everything – the player can fly, he can drive, he can go underground… After a while, I thought: ‘I’m never gonna finish this. It’s too much’. You have to stop and ask yourself: ‘What is really the meat of this thing?’

Was it almost a good thing that you were limited by the technology?
- Designing videogames is all ABOUT limitation. It’s not about doing everything that’s possible, just because you can. It’s about finding some small subset of something that’s FUN and building on that. With fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2, you can go back and forth on this barely two-dimensional line, but you have all this richness of being able to execute a big variety of moves within that simple framework. The backbone of the game is simple – it’s a small world, but the trick is how you work it to make it a rich and exciting world. You should be doing a few things very well, rather than a lot of things poorly.

Euge (R) and fellow Vid Kid Larry DeMar in beardier times.

At a time when videogames were quite static and samey, was Defender a bit of a reaction to that – something more brash and dynamic?
- Oh, yeah. You have to think – what am I doing that’s cool that no-one else has done before? Otherwise, what’s the point? With Defender, I knew that I wanted to do a game where you fly around. My only option at the time was 2D, so I thought, okay – you fly around in 2D, but, because the screen is so small, you’re gonna be bouncing off the walls and that isn’t much fun. So I thought of the screen as just one window on this expansive universe, and, the scrolling came from wanting to get a sense of speed and motion. All the best videogames are about survival – it’s our strongest instinct, stronger than food, sex, lust for money… You have to create a survival story – to tap into the raw energy and adrenaline and get people naturally excited. Sounds obvious, but that’s why you need a LOT of very nasty bad guys trying to kill you.

Noisily.
- Yeah! And in a really cool-looking way, too. People love special effects. They love to see things blow up, they love shiny, cool, sparkling stuff. At the time of Defender, we had a gifted nineteen-year-old programmer called Sam Dicker, and he was the particle effects genius – although at the time we didn’t know what the hell they were. We just wanted to blow stuff up in an attractive way – and I wanted everything to respond accordingly to how fast you’re flying, what you hit, how you hit it… Whenever I played Asteroids, I was always disappointed that, when you crash into a boulder, your ship just does this little rotate-and-collapse thing. That isn’t very exciting. I wanted those moments to feel more interactive – like, if you get hit by a bigger rock, something bigger and more spectacular happens than if you’re hit by a small one.

The game what he wrote.

Your games are good at creating a sense of relentless hostility and danger – urging the player to go into battle against seemingly impossible odds. That's particularly true of Robotron…
- Well, with Defender, you can fly around and, to some extent, find a little safety. But with Robotron, you’re stuck in this confined little space. That confinement is the key element in what makes Robotron feel the way it does. The constant feeling of being cornered and having to fight your way out of that corner – fight or flight. There’s no choice. You’re ALWAYS making a last stand. A lot of people tell me that Robotron is the only game that makes them physically sweat. It’s the same for me, too.

How long did it take you to be happy with Robotron?
- It was designed in six months. Going back to your original question about how to get it to ‘feel’ right – we designed all the graphics and animation in about two weeks, because there wasn’t much technology to play with. Today, you’re never really finished with your graphics because there’s so many options – reflectivity, alpha-shading, shattering systems… By the time you have the luxury of being able to focus on your gameplay, the deadline is looming. Then, we spent four out of the six months of Robotron’s development PLAYING the thing. We played the living hell out of it. We kind of got good – but not great – and somewhere along the way, we just developed a collective sense for the general feel and difficulty. I like to make things harder and harder for twenty or thirty waves and then roll things back a bit, recycle some stuff. It’s more fun to renew the player and give them a reward for everything they’ve been through, rather than just have the game get harder and harder. Today, players would expect – demand – more complexity. Robotron had around ten main bad guys and threats. Today’s players would want a hundred or so.

A squirrel. Drinking beer. With a straw. Yesterday. For Christ’s sake.

There’s a wonderful moment of tease at the beginning of the Brain Waves, where you get to survey your plan of attack and drool over the potential points from the masses of humanoids wandering around.
- It’s like when you’re feeding a squirrel. You hold out a nut and the squirrel comes close and he’s thinking: ‘My God – this guy has a wonderful nut in his hand…’. But, he’s also worried that you could easily kill him, too. That’s the feel at the beginning of the Robotron Brain Waves – those two motivating forces pulling you in opposite directions. The lust for the rewards and the fear of the danger.

Is it true that the dual-joystick design came from you breaking one of your hands in a car crash?
- Partly. Some guy jumped a red light and the shock of the impact through the steering wheel completely shattered my right hand. I was out for about six weeks. At the time, I loved Berzerk, but it was frustrating because my broken hand meant I couldn’t press the fire button any more. The limitations of the movement in that game were also annoying – you had to move towards the bad guy in order to fire a shot in his direction. So, both those things combined to give me the idea for a dual-joystick control where you could move in one direction and fire in another. Of course, with today’s console controllers, dual joystick control is quite normal.

”Humanoid must not pay ‘homage’ and design much better game…”

Do you think the Cruis’N games get the credit they deserve?
- Well, they were incredibly successful – we sold about 70,000 of ‘em. Probably one of the most successful series of arcade driving games. They were accepted among the arcade gaming masses, but the nerd types wanted more challenge to the actual business of being on the road. I wanted them to be more about fun and avoiding the traffic and less about fighting a bad control or difficult terrain. A lot of designers seem to believe that, when you try to turn right in a driving game, you shouldn’t actually turn right, you should go into a skid and blow up and flip over, otherwise it’s not ‘realistic’. I believe that if the player tries to turn right, then you should let ‘em – rather than messing around trying to make the game some ridiculous simulation that’s not very much fun.

What other elements/cliches of videogame design bug you?
- In PC and console games in particular, I hate it when I just can’t figure out what the game IS. It’s like the designer never really found out what was fun about the design and just tried to give the player lots of fancy options – you can drive backwards, have a camera up your exhaust pipe, lots of different kinds of gravity, whatever. If feels like they couldn’t quite find the point of the game and so they’re asking the player to design it for them. It’s as if they’re just trying to check as many boxes as possible. They think that if it takes a player two years to experience all of the options, then it’ll be two years before he figures out that it’s a bad game. I like it when a designer finds a strong, fun, cool aspect and transmits that with confidence. Like how, say, Spielberg tells a story with his movies. I want to be entertained and have a good sense that the entertainer knows what he’s doing. I want to feel like I’m in safe hands.

”Doubles, mate?”… “Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure…”

How come you haven’t designed anything for home consoles?
- Well, almost every arcade game I ever did has ended up on a home console in some form or other. My games were always hard on the guys trying to port them over because of the controller quirks. It’s difficult to take these games with custom controls and make them work with more standard kit. I love the freedom of designing arcade games – if I want another button, I drill a hole and wire it in. With consoles, you’re stuck with a standardised system. I want to be thinking about what would make a cool game, without having my creativity clouded with all these technical issues.

Your new game – Target: Terror – is deliberately contemporary. Are you worried about it being swept up in some kind of moral panic?
- I’ve never been one to shy away from controversy – NARC was all about blowing up drug dealers, TT is about blowing up terrorists. I’m tired of games where you have to go out and find some sword and sharpen it and find some evil guy and collect the special treasures. Particularly those tedious online games where everything is set in 1584 or whatever. I want to play games with subject matter I can relate to more. Terrorism is our current scourge, and I want people to experience strong emotions when they’re playing the game. It’s extremely, brutally, realistic. I just want to entertain people and make them feel emotionally connected to the thing that’s entertaining them. There is lots of humour, too, though – there’s a terrific action movie-style shoot-out in an airport bathroom.

mmmm, thrills!

Which games do you play?
- I’m totally into the Age Of Empires series. I love the fantasy of being in charge of EVERYTHING. There’s something really satisfying about the multitasking you have to cope with in those games – building your castle, growing your crops, keeping everyone happy… It’s totally the game for the attention-deficit-disorder generation, because there’s always something happening. But it’s the omnipotence I enjoy. I guess it is a bit of a God complex. I do play quite a few first-person shooters, too – Quake, etc. I play with my eleven-year-old and I always, always get my ass kicked.

What did you think of Jeff Minter’s remake of Defender on the Atari Jaguar – Defender 2000?
- It was great. Pretty brutal – wickedly fast and hard. From what he was trying to do – he did it, no question. There might not be too many players in the world who could deal with it, but he certainly nailed it. It was an extreme action version of Defender.

If you could remake any of your early games, would you change anything?
- I don’t think so. Within the 2D perspective, those games are just about as good as they can be. They’re so well attuned to that 2D world. They certainly wouldn’t translate into out-and-out 3D – which, I guess, would be the expected progression, these days. It’s that God’s-eye view that does it. It makes the game immediately tactical and strategic when you can see everything – either on-screen at the beginning of a wave in Robotron, or via the scanner in Defender. Games today have kind of warped into two different things: immersive first-person shooters – which can be great in their own way – and more strategic, God’s-eye view things like Warcraft or Age Of Empires or whatever. A game should be one or the other. If you try to mix things up and turn games that are naturally 2D into 3D, you get problems.

Are you good at your own games? What are your highest scores?
- I’m poor at Defender, but I’m a pretty good Robotron player. Anyone who’s serious about Robotron should be playing on difficulty level ten – with 25,000-per-extra-life setting. I’m an above-average player – but not great. So I can identify with both the crappy and the great. If I was a great player, I don’t think I could design good games – I’d end up making ‘em too hard.

Target: Terror debuts at the Las Vegas ASI game show, in March.

SICKBOY, February 2004.

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Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.

Raw Thrills. Not much there, yet. But, y’know…

Scary Squirrel World.

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Also, we've just spotted that Midway Arcade Treasures is out in the UK today. It's got Eugene's Defender, Robotron and Stargate on it - As well as loads of other stuff. I only hope that Mr Jarvis still gets a royalty. Oh, and amazon are doing it with a fiver off too. Click one of the links below and go play!

Midway Arcade Treasures (PS2) - £14.99

Midway Arcade Treasures (Xbox) - £14.99

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