Friday, May 9, 2008
Eugene Jarvis, legendary creator of "Defender" and "Robotron," is still making computer games for arcades. But his new bad guys aren't aliens -- they're terrorists who want to crash a plane into the White House.
Mar 2, 2004 | Guided by their infallible logic, the Robotrons conclude: The human race is inefficient, and must therefore be eliminated.
The 1982 arcade game "Robotron" offered a hyperactive, paranoid vision of a future gone awry. With two joysticks and a steady supply of quarters, you could save the world, but only for so long. Today Eugene Jarvis, designer of "Robotron," is still worried about a future gone mad. But it's no longer machines that are the enemies, but terrorists.
Sure to be among the first class of inductees at the Pong-shaped Video Game Hall of Fame when and if it is built, Eugene Jarvis is a legend in gaming circles -- not for making cute or simple games, but for games that are unbelievably, knuckle-bashingly difficult. Jarvis' C.V. reads like a litany of squandered allowances and sleepless nights for anyone who has stepped into an arcade in the last 25 years: "Defender," "Robotron," "Stargate," "Blaster," "NARC" and "Smash T.V."
Arcade games have become something of an afterthought in the era of the PC game and the home console, but Jarvis hasn't given up on the genre. He's founded a new company, Raw Thrills, and is planning to reinvigorate the industry. Raw Thrills' first volley is the upcoming counterterrorism two-player shooter "Target: Terror." "Target: Terror" asks players to save the Golden Gate Bridge, defend the Los Alamos Laboratory, and, somewhat controversially, prevent a hijacked airliner from crashing into the White House.
Jarvis spoke with Salon by phone from his Chicago office. He talked about the history and evolution of the video-gaming industry, the challenges of portraying terrorists, why he is a fan of video-game emulation but a critic of "Grand Theft Auto," and the pros and cons of green blood.
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Next year will be the 25th anniversary of "Defender." Did you think you would still be making games 25 years after that game?
You know, I didn't know if I would be making games six months later.
Are you still as enthusiastic about it as you were then?
I guess at the time it was just kind of a brand new thing. We went from a blank screen to something, so it was extremely exciting, kind of like being the guys who showed up at Sutter's Mill in 1849 and started picking gold up off the ground, you know? It was just the start of everything and very exciting and new. There were no rules. It's like that was the Summer of Love of video games and now it's largely a huge corporate business based on branded titles, pre-sold movies, and, you know, "Madden 4008."
So, in some ways, I guess, to a purist -- to a gamer -- it's a little disillusioning in that it turned into just another corporation trying to sell another box of crap to the hapless consumer. There's that famous quote -- I guess some marketing guy was bragging and said, "Our marketing is so good, that we could put shit in a box and sell it." And the gamer's response was: "Well, you do."
There is a certain disillusionment whenever anything becomes a real business -- then all the rules, marketing, and stratagems that make up real businesses come into play and it's real money now. It's not like a couple of guys in a garage doing a game, you've got to actually have a plan about what you're doing; you have to not just shoot from the hip. We were jazz musicians in those days, just riffing on whatever cool new beat came along, and now it's carefully crafted, orchestrated; you play your cymbal -- your full-time job is to play your cymbal on the 3,084th beat of this measure and you better be damn happy doing it. If not, there's four guys waiting to take your place [laughs]. You're animating the shoelaces on the Q.B. [quarterback] and that's your job. You're a shoelace specialist. You're not really saving the world anymore, you know? Just making a better shoelace shader.
Have games been eclipsed by all the effects?
Yeah, sometimes I come to work and I feel like I'm an interior decorator, you know? It's like: "Man, that green looks like shit!" "Don't you know this year it's purple, man! Green is out!" You're worried about all these shadows and reflections and eye candy and you're right, sometimes it's more about that than the game. "Madden 2004" is a hell of a lot like "Madden 1004." I think partly it's a limitation of the human being. You make things too complicated and too wild and people just can't deal with it. As much as there's all this marketing bullshit about how real everything is and how great the A.I. [artificial intelligence] is and all this stuff, you know, the guys really aren't a hell of a lot smarter than the guys that were running around on "Defender," and for good reason. Because you don't want a guy that's so smart that he kills you. You want somebody stupid that you can destroy.
You started out at Atari. When was that?
That was back in '77. I was working with Nolan Bushnell [the creator of "Pong"]. Actually I was doing pinball games at the time. Atari was kind of on an ill-fated mission to get into the pinball business. It was an exciting time in that the pinball business was turning into electronics and there were all these neat things you could do with computer controls, lighting and sound effects, and mechanical devices, throwing balls hither and thither. So it was kind of exciting, but there was a lot of real engineering involved in the mechanics and electronics, and, unfortunately, Atari pinball was more of an inspiration -- I guess it was more inspiration than perspiration -- and so the thing just basically kind of caught on fire [laughs]. It wasn't cool, you know, doing heat tests ...
So it literally caught on fire?
Yeah, you know? It's not sexy to do life testing on mechanical devices and put your circuitry in the oven and see if it burns up. That wasn't really what Atari was about. Unfortunately, it didn't go well, but we had some fun and put out some cool games.
How would you sum up the current state of the arcade? You've been through booms and busts and booms again ...
The arcade is kind of on life support these days. It's been beaten down. I guess the first wave was really the console games. There was a war there. The arcades were able to maintain a technical superiority for many, many years, which gave them a little better graphics and better controls and so forth. [Now] you look at the PlayStation 2 or Xbox controller and there's, like, 27 buttons on the thing and three or four joysticks. Contrast that with the original Atari controller, which was a single joystick and a single button.
I remember when we came out with "Defender," which had a joystick and six or seven buttons, it was like, holy shit! Nobody knew what to do with it -- it was just too weird. Now that looks simplistic [compared] to today's controllers. So the gamer today really has an amazing quality of gaming experience in the home. Then you add to that the Internet and you can play almost any kind of simple, arcade-style game. There's any number of Internet sites where you just go for free and you can play games forever for free. That's going to give competition to both the arcade and the console people, who are trying to make you pay to play.
It's amazing the quality of entertainment people have for almost no cost. It's phenomenal. I was thinking about "Everquest" and those online games and a buddy of mine said, "Yeah, they raised that to 15 bucks a month! It's outrageous!" If the average guy plays a hundred hours a month on those games, he's paying 15 bucks for 100 hours of entertainment, which is like 15 cents an hour. You pay more than that just to turn the light bulb on on your desk! The electricity costs you more than that.
Try to replicate that with quarters in an arcade ...
Right! You consume more than that in just cookies and milk. It is amazing, the absolute cost effectiveness and ubiquitousness of the whole gaming thing. I think Windows is part of that, too. DOS was boring and you had to kind of type and shit. Is there really anything in Windows that you couldn't do any better on your old computer? Just now it takes 30 seconds to boot up your word processor. [But] it makes work fun because you're playing a video game at work, clicking on boxes and stuff. All of life has almost become a video game. So the arcade has tough competition and really, what does it provide? It provides you head-to-head, face-to-face [competition], which I guess reached its peak in the "Street Fighter," "Mortal Kombat" fighting-game era where you go down to the arcade and kick your buddy's ass. That was really a cool, cool thing. Now, the Internet has subsumed that with the head-to-head death-match play on any number of games.
[The arcade] is cool because you get out of the house. You still have the ability to have cool driving cockpits and you can use guns to shoot people. There's a certain advantage in the controls you can have -- snowmobile sleds you sit down on and turn the handlebars and stuff. So, you've got your skateboard or your ski games and so forth. You've got some physical element there -- you have the old prop cycle game where you get on your bicycle-powered hang glider and pump the pedals. You have the fact that it's just kind of there if you're in a movie theater, if you're somewhere and you're bored and have nothing to do and the game is there. It's an out-of-the-home experience. It's sadly a small echo of where it was, but it's still out there and there are still some glimmers of excitement now and then.
What I love about the arcade market is you're so directly [connected] to the people and you basically find out within five minutes if anybody likes your game. You stick it out on a street corner and see if anyone plays it [laughs]. You don't need legions of market research people and all these so-called experts to tell you if your game sucks or not. You just put it out there and see if it makes any money and within three hours you've saved yourself $300,000 worth of market research. That's the immediacy of the business. It's actually fairly easy to get your title out there. Sony doesn't have to sign off on your stuff; you don't have to have some huge corporate committee with their $20 million budget give you the blessing. There's a certain down-on-the-street feeling to the arcade that's fun.
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