A token of an arcade legend’s school spirit

Sure, Eugene Jarvis’ innovative video game career began in a basement. But it wasn’t his mother’s.

It was in Birge Hall, adjacent to the Campanile, where he got his first taste of video games in the mid-’70s before receiving his B.S. in electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) in 1976. There, he’d hover over an ancient IBM 704 machine in the lower depths of the physics building to play 1962’s Spacewar! “Which was the first real video game,” he said. 

The way he tells it, he had to feed a deck of punch cards into an old mainframe with an oscilloscope for a vector XY display. “The CPU registers were kept on a massive rack of circuit boards,” each containing one measly bit of memory. On bad days, he had to plug them in and out just to make sure the connections were right. But it was worth it to experience the game’s “beautiful, beautiful hi-res monochrome vector graphics.”

Spacewar!’s minimalist setup was “the original death match.” Two player-run rocket ships shot at each other amid a starry backdrop, as the gravitational pull of a center star ensnared “careless players to inevitable destruction.” Movement was limited to a small display, but the wraparound effect was novel. “We spent all night playing this game, and it seemed like only a few minutes had passed — just in time for the dreaded 8 a.m. lecture!” Jarvis said. Thus, a gaming pioneer was born. 

In 1980, the EECS alum would make his own mark on the fictional space frontier with Defender. Long before the gaming series Dark Souls tested players’ mettle (and patience), Jarvis’ game was ramping up the difficulty level across arcades — and innovating how video games on a whole were structured. 

While the space backdrop was already well-trodden, Defender players were firing at alien invaders amid a whole new terrain. Here they were, side-scrolling in both directions, with an overhead mini-map offering them a full view. Initial tests indicated that this unit was more than OK. With sales of over 60,000 cabinets, this coin operation racked up a chunk of change to the tune of $1.5 billion, as Wired noted.

“Up until in the pre-Defender era, almost every game was stuck on a screen,” Jarvis said. “You’re stuck on this screen. How can you maximize this real estate that you’ve been given?” He couldn’t think of anything “cooler” than letting the player fly through not just one screen, but 3 1/2. 

“Actually, the technology wasn’t that sophisticated, but it was more the game structure,” he continued. “It was one of the first games that had what’s known as a bitmap display, which is kind of the standard technique for the last 30 or 40 years. But it was new at the time.” 

Before bitmaps expertly stacked blinking pixels in rows, there were motion object generators that would move and display the sprites individually. “It used to be that even if you had five enemies in the game, you’d have five hardware circuits outputting the enemies,” he explained. 

Now, the computer could move objects directly — meaning you weren’t limited to five or six motion objects. Defender allowed for a “much more complex play,” as dozens — or even hundreds — of moving objects could appear on screen. 

Then there was the smart bomb, “the most dynamic thing in the game,” as Jarvis puts it. Basically, you’d hit the green button on the control panel, and the entire universe would explode. 

“It takes 128 particles to blow up the player, and that was because you are the most important thing in the universe. Every player is convinced they’re the most important thing in the universe. And I think they’re right.” Big pause. “For them.”

Believe it or not, this computer science alum wasn’t always going to study engineering. He arrived at Berkeley as a biochemistry major. 

So why the switch? “Well, I experienced organic chemistry,” he said wryly. 

It was in a computer programming class where he found that he was a natural. “I love the logic of it,” he said. “You look at biochemistry, and you’re dealing with nature. You’re dealing with God’s creation, if you’re religious at all. And so you’re trying to find the rules to this game where there’s so much mystery.”

Instead, he constructed his own worlds with their own internal logic. “You could have the rules that you want,” he said. “If you’re upside-down the whole time, cool, whatever you want, anything goes.”

The mid-’70s was a time when the “software priesthood” was giving way to personal computers. “You could kind of feel like there was a revolution happening.” Suddenly, computer science was less confined to the mainframe computers. “CPUs were everywhere.” The floodgates to interactive storytelling were open to all. 

“In the early days, I remember it was like, ‘Oh, what am I going to do?’” he said. “‘They haven’t done a basketball game; I’ll do a basketball game. They haven’t done a story game; I’ll do a story game.’ It was like every game was this whole new thing.”

In the decades following the rise of consoles, PC gaming and the mobile market, Jarvis is still going strong in the arcade space. He heads game studio Raw Thrills — and his corner of the gaming industry still has the market share on full-sensory experiences.

His arcade cabinetry is stocked with everything from Godzilla VR’s wind and vibration effects to the Fast & Furious drivers’ seats. “We’re tapping into that very basic kind of fantasy of doing something you never could dream of doing, riding a race car or fighting Godzilla, saving the world,” he said. “That’s a big thing the arcade has. It’s combining the physical with the virtual.”

Now, he’s made his mark on a whole new part of campus at the Grimes Engineering Center. Less a technicolor fantasia and more sustainable student hub, the Eugene Jarvis Auditorium and Raw Thrills Lounge will offer a space for students to make vital discoveries — both in tech and about themselves. 

For those students, he offered some words of advice. “I guess this is maybe very trite, but you have to find your passion. It’s an iterative process. Life is iterative,” he said. “That’s the cool thing about the campus here in Berkeley. There’s just a million disciplines. Be open to new experiences.”