Eugene Jarvis

Eugene Jarvis
Jarvis speaks during the Vid Kidz panel at California Extreme 2016
Born	1955 (age 61–62) Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Video game and pinball programmer
Known for	Programmer of Defender and Firepower

Eugene Peyton Jarvis (born 1955) is an American game designer and programmer, known for producing pinball machines for Atari and video games for Williams Electronics. Most notable amongst his works are the seminal arcade video games Defender and Robotron: 2084 in the early 1980s, and the Cruis'n series of driving games for Midway Games in the 1990s. He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio, Raw Thrills Inc. In 2008 Eugene Jarvis was named the first Game Designer in Residence by DePaul University's Game Development program. His family owns the Jarvis Wines company in Napa, CA.

Jarvis was born in Palo Alto, California in 1955 and grew up in Menlo Park. His first game was chess, which he played as a young child; he was one of the best players at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose. Jarvis's first encounter with computers came while he was in high school attending a one-day course on FORTRAN programming given by IBM. Jarvis originally intended to become a biochemist but decided on studying computers instead. At the University of California, Berkeley, Jarvis did FORTRAN programming on mainframes. At Berkeley he got his first taste of computer gaming, playing Space War in the basement of the physics lab. He received his B.S. in EECS in 1976 from Berkeley. In his last days before graduation, he interviewed with Atari, but did not receive a call back.