![]() ![]() Oh, Jarvis also mentored Ed Boon, co-creator of "Mortal Kombat," and game developer Mark Trammell of Zynga. "But Eugene? Hits era after era, genre after genre. "This business is so technology-driven you're lucky to have one big game in one era," said Larry DeMar, Jarvis' former designing partner. More recently, he's the guy behind the "Fast and Furious" driving games, the publisher of "Big Buck Hunter" and the developer who recognized, as Hollywood did decades earlier when faced with the threat of television, the physical size of the medium would be key to its survival: Raw Thrills' machines, the industry standard, are loud and gigantic. During the pinball era, Jarvis' successes included Atari's "Superman" and Williams Electronics' "Firepower" and "High Speed." During the early '80s he designed "Defender," "Stargate," and "Robotron" during the late '80s and '90s, he made "Narc," "Smash TV," and the "Cruis'n USA" franchise. After college, he was hired by Atari, where founder Nolan Bushnell was pushing innovations (and Jobs was designing a new "Pong" game named "Breakout"). (Which is like being the first guy to say, "Hey, what would happen if we added pages to this stone tablet?") Also, dual joysticks - he created dual joysticks.Īs a teenager he attended the meetings of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, which included Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Much to my disappointment, people relate to games, not creators." When I told him this, he said: "Many of us then had an illusion that designers would become like rock stars, that people would recognize the signature of a designer the way they saw the signature of a film director. ![]() I knew who he was before I knew who Bob Dylan was. Indeed, he was, and is, one of the few famous game designers. For a time in the '80s, he was something of a famous game designer, the subject of several magazine pieces and media attention. Still, I was surprised that even here, surrounded by the culture he had a big hand in creating, no one stopped him. He went unrecognized, as he would most places. This was a year ago, when I first met Jarvis, at the Big Buck Hunter World Championship Tournament at the Cubby Bear bar near Wrigley Field. The young guy's girlfriend held two beers and nodded to the boyish Jarvis, who smiled, turned and walked through a throng of other gamers. ![]()
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