Eugene Peyton Jarvis is an American game designer and video game programmer, known for producing pinball machines for Atari and video games for Williams Electronics. Most notable among 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, California. Early life and education Jarvis was born in Palo Alto, California and grew up in Menlo Park. He has an older sister, Diane, and a younger sister, Helen. 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 Spacewar! 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. Career Having an interest in natural language processing, Jarvis was hired by Hewlett-Packard to help create a COBOL compiler. He disliked the boring HP culture and quit after only three days into the six-year project. A few days later, three months after his interview, Atari finally called him back, interested in hiring him. He joined them and started programming some of the first pinball games that used microprocessors. Atari's pinball development branch failed a few years later, so he moved to Chicago to continue programming pinball games for Williams Electronics. Video arcade games As Jarvis worked on pinball games at Williams in the late 1970s, Space Invaders was released, sparking great interest in microprocessor-based video games. Jarvis wanted to try making a video game. When thinking of design ideas with famed pinball designer Steve Ritchie, they developed the concept for Defender – a side-scroller with the player flying over the