What Sort of Man Invents Defender?

Until the fall of 1980. Williams Electronics limited its production pretty much to solid-state pinball machines. While Atari, Stern Electronics, Bally's Midway Manufacturing Company and other game manufacturers were making a killing on games such as Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Asteroids and Berzerk, Williams hadn't even marketed its first video game. But when it did, the game was a doozy.

When Defender debuted at the annual Amusement and Music Operators Association convention at the end of October 1980, the initial industry reaction was that it was too complicated, a very fancy disaster. By the following June, however, Defender was the top video game in the country, the one that brought in more quarters per week than any other game on the market.

And despite their early snickers, Williams' competitors had to give it credit. "For a first effort, and particularly for a game designed in house," concedes Stan Jarocki, Midway's director of marketing, "Defender is amazing."

Eugene Jarvis isn't a bit surprised. Jarvis, 27, is the man who designed Defender along with another Williams Electronics computer-science whiz named Sam Dicker. How does Jarvis feel about making so important a contribution to the contemporary culture?

"It's a rush," he says.

A native Californian, Jarvis graduated in 1976 from the (continued on page 230)Defender inventor(continued from page 168) University of California at Berkeley with a degree in computer science. But he had been fascinated by games long before that.

"It started with pinball when I was six or seven," he says, "and by the time I was a teenager, pinball was my favorite form of recreation. That was when I first learned a little bit about how game machines are built. There were certain pinball machines on which, if you tilled them at the same time that the game was ending, you would automatically get a free game. Then there were other machines where, if you took a bolt out of one of the legs, you could stick a wire in the hole and trip the coin mechanism.

"But games didn't become an addiction for me until I got to college. There was an obsolete computer down in the basement of the physics lab--a 1959 model that filled a whole room but couldn't do half of what some pocket calculators can do now--and someone had programmed an old person-against-person game into it called Space War. The machine was so old that the viewer was an old oscilloscope that someone had attached to it. All the nerds hung out in that basement playing Space War until the early hours of the morning."

If it seems strange that Jarvis would call himself a nerd, you should realize that it's nerds like him who are taking over the world, and they know they're taking over, so they don't mind what you call them. "Sure, I was a nerd," says Jarvis. "Most computer people are nerds. If you're a true nerd, you can't deal with people at all, only machines. You see, the computer programmer's ego trip is playing God. You can create a universe, a whole world that's predictable, a world that operates by your laws. I guess that's why I decided to get into creating games."

As soon as he graduated, Jarvis went to work for Atari's now-defunct pinball division, designing programs for electronic pinball games. "I was there for two years," he recalls, "and while I was there, Atari was doing very poorly in pinball. I remember I worked on a game called Airborne Avenger. Terrible design. There was always shit falling off the machine, stuff would short out and blow up. I also worked on games called Superman, Atarians, Time 2000 and Space Riders. All had good play appeal, but they were terribly undependable. They were constantly breaking down. I was pretty discouraged, even though I was responsible for only the special effects--the sound, lights and so on. At the end of two years, I was completely burned out, so I left."

He wasn't out of work long. Steve Ritchie, one of the best pinball designers in the industry, was working for Williams and he wanted Jarvis on board. Motivated more by a desire to work with Ritchie than by an interest in designing any more pinball machines, Jarvis packed his bags and moved to Chicago, where Williams (as well as Midway and Stern) is located.

"After about a year of working under Ritchie, I began to push for a video game. I wanted to be the guy who designed it. I saw it as the chance of a lifetime. What I like about video games is that they play with your survival instinct. That's the big difference between video games and pinball."

In early 1980, Williams decided to let Jarvis give it a try. The company gave him eight months to complete a test model that could be shown at the annual A.M.O.A. convention in Chicago in the fall.

"The first thing I did was to begin to work with a team of hardware engineers to decide on the kind of electronic system we'd use. Early on in the process of designing a video game, you have to decide on the architecture of the system--how much memory to give the game's computer, how to organize the data paths, what screen resolution you want. Then, once you've settled on the hardware, you get down to the specifics of the game. What is it? How does it work?"

Jarvis had a very general idea of what he wanted. "I wanted to create a world with plausible laws of physics," he says, "a plausible environment and a good reason for you to be in that world besides just killing something."

So the first thing he made was the surface of a planet, or, rather, the outline of the surface, complete with mountains and valleys. "Then, because I wanted a three-dimensional feeling, I put stars in the background, against a black sky, and made them move, but only at half the rate of the foreground objects. Next, I created the spaceship, which is the central piece, of course."

At that point, however, Jarvis got stuck. He couldn't decide on what kinds of villains his spaceship would have to fight, nor what the powers of his spaceship were to be. "So while I was waiting for the rest of the game to dawn on me, I began putting little men on the bottom of the screen, just walking around. Everybody on the project thought that was stupid, an incredible waste of time. Before I knew it, it was two months before that A.M.O.A. convention and we still didn't have a game. Williams' management was shitting--I was beyond the doghouse, in the outhouse. By then, I'd created the enemies--the landers, pods, baiters, swarmers, bombers and mutants--but I still didn't have the theme of the game worked out. The only thing I knew was that we were going to call the game Defender, so we had to defend something."

It was six weeks before Jarvis received the inspiration that would transform his game from just another shoot-'em-up into what Joseph Dillon, Williams' director of sales, proudly calls a nearly mystical experience, a cult game, the most sophisticated concept on the market.

Jarvis again: "Two weeks before the game was supposed to be finished, I was almost over the edge. About that time, I began dreaming about the game, seeing myself flying around that world in my rocket. The game was all I thought about, but it still didn't come together. Then, one night as I was drifting off to sleep, the whole thing flashed on me: The answer was the little men I'd put down on the planet back at the beginning. The men were what the rocket was defending! Immediately, the idea came to me that the rocket would try to defend them by not only killing the enemies but rescuing the men as the enemies lifted them up into space. I don't know of another game that gives you a chance to retrieve your man after the enemy has gotten him. Plus which, the men are your friends. That gives you a reason to be there. In most video worlds, the player doesn't have a friend. It's lonely."

Jarvis stayed up all night, working out the final details of his vision: when he returned to work the next Monday, he was ready to roll. "My team worked night and day for the next two weeks. We stayed up 48 hours straight the two days before the convention, and somehow we finished it."

Was it a hit at the show? "You might say it maintained a low profile," says Jarvis. "It certainly didn't attract as much attention as some of the other machines. I think most people thought it was too complicated to be very popular."

Nonetheless, within months after the Williams people put the machine on the market, they knew they had a hit on their hands. A big hit. Jarvis, who had been salaried at about $40,000 a year (top game designers with a reputation like Ritchie's can make upwards of $100,000 per year), thought that he deserved a big bonus. Williams thought he deserved one, too, but what it offered wasn't what Jarvis thought he deserved.

"If a company licenses a machine designed by an overseas company, it pays between four and ten percent of its total profits. [Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Scramble and many other popular video games are licensed from Japanese companies.] Williams had its own in-house monster, of which it has sold more than $100,000,000 worth. They offered me a bonus of cash and stock options spread out over four years. It didn't seem like enough to me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that game designers can get ripped off. The companies make millions and the designers get only a few thousand. So I turned down their bonus and quit."

Jarvis and fellow designer Larry DeMar have since started their own video-game design company--named Vid Kidz. "The game I'm working on now, for instance," says Jarvis, "is even better than Defender. But now I'm in a position to sell the game to the highest bidder, ask for royalties and a percentage of leasing rights. If I get, say, four percent of the profits on it, and it does as well as Defender, that'll earn me maybe $1,000,000."

But neither the success of Defender nor the prospect of being filthy rich before he's 30 even fazes Jarvis. About the only thing that does is the fact that some people have scored close to 1,000,000 points on his brain child.

"When I first played Defender myself, I thought that 60,000 was as high as it was humanly possible to go. Even now, I can't get more than 200,000, and that's with a year of practice."

"'The only thing I knew was that we were calling it Defender, so we had to defend something.'"