Photo courtesy Eugene JarvisGame changer
Sure, Eugene Jarvis’s (B.S.’76 EECS) 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. 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, he’d make his own mark on the fictional space frontier with Defender, which innovated how video games on a whole were structured. While the space backdrop was 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. 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 notes.
“Up until in the pre-Defender era, almost every game was stuck on a screen,” Jarvis said. He couldn’t think of anything “cooler” than letting the player fly through not just one screen, but 3 1/2.
“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,” he continued. “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.
The computer now 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. Hit the green button, and the universe would explode.
Decades later, Jarvis heads game studio Raw Thrills — and his corner of the gaming industry still has the market share on full-sensory experiences. “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.
Now, he’s made his mark on campus at the Grimes Engineering Center, where the Eugene Jarvis Auditorium and Raw Thrills Lounge offer a space for students to make vital discoveries. For them, he offered some 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.”
Learn more: A token of an arcade legend’s school spirit