1. Eugene Peyton Jarvis is an American game designer and video game programmer, known for producing pinball machines for Williams Electronics and video games for Atari.
16 Facts About Eugene Jarvis
1. 2.
Eugene Jarvis co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills.
3.
In 2008, Eugene Jarvis was named the first Game Designer in Residence by DePaul University's Game Development program.
4.
Eugene Jarvis's family owns the Jarvis Wines company in Napa, California.
5.
Eugene Jarvis has an older sister, Diane, and a younger sister, Helen.
6.
Eugene Jarvis originally intended to become a biochemist but decided on studying computers instead.
7.
At the University of California, Berkeley, Eugene Jarvis did FORTRAN programming on mainframes.
8.
Eugene Jarvis disliked the boring HP culture and quit after only three days into the six-year project.
9.
Eugene Jarvis joined them and started programming some of the first pinball games that used microprocessors.
10.
Williams expanded greatly with the success of Defender, but Eugene Jarvis left to found an independent game development firm called Vid Kidz with Larry DeMar in February 1981.
11.
Eugene Jarvis's next hit with Vid Kidz was the high-action game Robotron, which was produced by Williams in 1982.
12.
Eugene Jarvis left Vid Kidz in 1984 to attend Stanford University, where he gained an MBA in 1986.
13.
Eugene Jarvis continued making games, designing Narc and helping develop Smash TV, which drew comparisons to Robotron.
14.
Eugene Jarvis had been interested in virtual reality since attending Berkeley in the 1970s.
15.
Eugene Jarvis helped create 3D texture mapping hardware which ended up being used in his Cruis'n series of games.
16.
In 2008, Eugene Jarvis was named DePaul University's first Game Designer in Residence.