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Episode 400: Eugene Jarvis

Pinball Profile·podcast_episode·50m 0s·held·Jul 21, 2024
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Eugene Jarvis on 50+ years innovating pinball and arcade gaming, from Atari to Raw Thrills.

Summary

Eugene Jarvis, legendary video game and pinball designer and CEO of Raw Thrills, shares his career spanning Atari, Williams, and arcade gaming on Pinball Profile 400th episode milestone. The conversation covers his early love of electromechanical pinball, his pioneering work on solid-state pinball at Atari alongside Steve Ritchie, innovations in sound design and synthesizers, the creation of Firepower and its multiball mechanics, and his transition to groundbreaking arcade video games like Defender that outsold Pac-Man.

Key Claims

  • Eugene Jarvis interviewed with Atari in fall 1976 but never heard back; started anyway and was quickly elevated to department leadership within weeks

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis directly describing his Atari hiring experience

  • Atari pinball games used electromagnetic ball sensors, rotary solenoids, and placed circuit boards at the bottom of cabinets, leading to multiple failure modes including overheating score panels, flipper bearing failures, sensor depth calibration issues, and screws falling onto and shorting circuit boards

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis detailed technical explanation of Atari pinball hardware failures

  • Steve Ritchie had dreams of designing his own pinball games while working as a prototype lab technician at Atari, discussing these plans in the parking lot before eventually leaving to go to Williams

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis recounting his interactions with Steve Ritchie at Atari

  • Flash (designed by Steve Ritchie and programmer Randy Pfeiffer at Williams) defined the future of pinball and introduced significant audio innovations

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis crediting Flash's impact on pinball

  • Firepower was inspired by 1970s Bally electromechanical multiball games and was designed as a multimedia event focused on moments and choreographed sequences rather than pure score

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis explaining Firepower's design philosophy

  • Defender had a scrolling world approximately three and a half screens in size, compared to earlier games using single-screen wraparound worlds

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis comparing Defender's world design to earlier arcade games

  • The first computerized virtual reality system was created by Ivan Sutherland in the late 1960s at University of Utah/Harvard, with 3 frames per second and room-sized apparatus

    high confidence · Eugene Jarvis citing VR history

  • Atari Incorporated pinball programmers claimed it was impossible to flash a light in a pinball game; Eugene Jarvis accomplished this in his first week, leading colleagues to believe he was a genius

Notable Quotes

  • “Back then I was the young kid on the block, and now I'm the new dinosaur.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ early in episode — Self-aware humor about his long career; sets tone for historical retrospective

  • “I probably spent way too much time playing pinball as a kid, you know, as a student, you know, when I should have been probably studying a little more.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ early childhood memories section — Personal connection to pinball's cultural impact as a recreational escape

  • “we're redefining everything, all this little crap from Chicago, it's garbage. We're Silicon Valley.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ discussing Atari's approach to pinball design — Captures Atari's disruptive mindset and confidence in reimagining pinball hardware

  • “So basically, we thought of ways to, some of the early games we had a lot of echoey sounds. So it would be like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, da-da-da-da-da. And so that would cover a lot of kind of stretching out the sounds.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ discussing sound design innovation — Reveals creative problem-solving in early synthesizer sound design with hardware constraints

  • “It's not just points. And so we had this whole... We had to lock these three balls to create the multiball thing, and they would kick him out, and this whole choreographed sequence with lights... this was more about you're creating an event.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ Firepower design section — Articulates shift from score-focused to event-focused pinball design philosophy

  • “You know, Steve was very hard on programmers. It was like it's been heard once or twice. But, you know, it was part it's part of his, you know, if you're trying to do a revolution, you can't like, you know, take no for an answer.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ discussing Steve Ritchie's demanding nature — Explains the high standards and conflict inherent in revolutionary design work

  • “the programmer at that era you become the designer too so i don't have to like be you know working with somebody like Steve Ritchie you know who's could be very stubborn and opinionated and it's like i just what the hell i want to do”

Entities

Eugene JarvispersonSteve RitchiepersonJeff TillpersonRandy PfeifferpersonIvan SutherlandpersonAtaricompanyWilliamscompanyRaw Thrills

Signals

  • ?

    historical_signal: Detailed first-hand account of solid-state pinball revolution at Atari (mid-1970s), documenting transition from electromechanical to electronic systems, including hardware innovations (electromagnetic sensors, rotary solenoids, microprocessor-based sound synthesis) and their failure modes

    high · Eugene Jarvis's detailed technical description of Atari pinball design choices and their consequences (overheating score panels, sensor calibration failures, falling screws shorting boards)

  • ?

    design_innovation: Pioneering use of microprocessor-based digital sound synthesis in pinball and arcade games, enabling unique synthesized sounds that distinguished games in noisy arcades, replacing traditional chimes and bells; single-track mono model with priority system for sound impact

    high · Eugene Jarvis explaining synthesis capabilities at Williams, Randy Pfeiffer's sound programming on Flash, and the strategic advantage of cutting through arcade cacophony with distinctive sounds

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Shift from score-focused gameplay to event-focused gameplay, exemplified by Firepower's multiball design as a choreographed multimedia moment rather than point accumulation; foundational to modern pinball design philosophy

    high · Eugene Jarvis articulating Firepower's design: 'this was more about you're creating an event... using every sounds and lights and off-limit displays to create some huge event'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Defender introduced scrolling game worlds (~3.5 screens wraparound) to create sense of flight and immersion, representing second-generation arcade game design evolution beyond single-screen wraparound worlds; foundational to modern game perspective and player experience

    high · Eugene Jarvis explaining Defender's design goal: 'we wanted to have the feeling of flight... So to do that, we did a scrolling world'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.150

0:00
it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff till she can find everything on pinballprofile.com we're on twitter x instagram at pinball profile we've got a great facebook group as well, you can email pinballprofile at gmail.com. This is a special episode, number 400. This podcast began November 1st, 2016. I made a trip to Stern Pinball. Jody Dankberg was kind enough to give me a tour, and there I saw one of my pinball heroes, Steve Ritchie. That was the time I thought, okay, I'm going to pull up my phone, record a quick little interview. That interview aired on November 1st, 2016, the first ever episode, and it's funny how we come full circle because Steve Ritchie will be mentioned more than once in this podcast as we celebrate number 400. But I do want to thank the people that helped get us here to number 400. Other podcasters like the Slam Tilt Podcast, Ryan C. from Head to Head, my friends Ian Harrower, Dan Beeson gave me some tips as well. And I can honestly say in almost eight years, it has been an absolute pleasure to bring these to you and hopefully get you to know a little bit more about our guests and their passions. Since we began, we started a Patreon group. The show will always be free. Don't worry, but I do have to thank so many people who've been kind enough to donate and be a part of the Patreon subscription. Your support makes me keep going and I can't thank you enough. So Rodney C, Lua W, Jimmy Law, William M, Tony V, Jerry S, David S, John L, Jake C, you are more than generous for what you've done. Again, patreon.com slash pinball profile. I've been trying to get this guest for quite some time. I saw the milestone number 400 come up. I said, okay, that would be perfect. He agreed. It might have taken a little while to get there, but we finally did. It also didn't hurt when you actually go to his office and maybe demand that we do this now. It was an absolute pleasure to speak to a genuine innovator and legend in the gaming world. Here on episode 400 of Pinball Profile, let's say hi to the CEO and president of Raw Thrills, Eugene Jarvis. Eugene, great to see you. Thanks so much for doing this. Hey, Jeff. A pleasure. I love talking about the good old days. Back then I was the young kid on the block, and now I'm the new dinosaur. Don't say the new dinosaur. By the way, we share the same birthday, January 27th. Pretty much the same. I mean, forget the years. They're close enough, right?
2:38

high confidence · Eugene Jarvis recounting early programming breakthroughs at Atari

Eugene Jarvis @ comparing pinball design to video game design — Highlights autonomy difference between pinball (collaborative designer-programmer) and arcade games (programmer-led design)

  • “Defender, we wanted to have the feeling of flight. that rush you get from just ripping down through the universe at Mach 7. So to do that, we did a scrolling world.”

    Eugene Jarvis @ discussing Defender design philosophy — Shows how experiential goal (sense of flight) drove technical innovation (scrolling worlds)

    • company
    Airborne Avengergame
    Supermangame
    Flashgame
    Firepowergame
    Defendergame
    Space Invadersgame
    Asteroidsgame
    Space Warsgame
    Missile Commandgame
    Virtualitygame
    Pac-Mangame
    Pinball Profileorganization
    UC Berkeleyorganization
    Stern Pinballcompany
  • ?

    design_innovation: Firepower pioneered multiball mechanics in solid-state era, adapting complicated 1970s Bally electromechanical multiball concepts to electronic platform; designed as rare, high-skill achievement that creates aspirational moments for repeated play

    high · Eugene Jarvis: 'If you were really good, maybe every few games... you certainly wouldn't get it multiple times in a game. But you see someone do it, and you want to do it'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Steve Ritchie and Eugene Jarvis working collaboratively at Atari and Williams; Ritchie as designer with strong vision, Jarvis as programmer/technologist; relationship shows tension between design authority and technical implementation

    high · Eugene Jarvis describing Ritchie's demands: 'Steve was very hard on programmers... if you're trying to do a revolution, you can't take no for an answer'

  • ?

    content_signal: Pinball Profile podcast reached 400th episode; started November 1, 2016 with Steve Ritchie interview from Stern Pinball; represents ~8 years of continuous pinball community content and access to industry figures

    high · Jeff Till's opening remarks about podcast founding, first episode featuring Steve Ritchie, and acknowledgment of milestone achievement

  • ?

    historical_signal: Detailed history of arcade video game evolution: Space War (1960s, physics-based), first generation (Space Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Command), second generation (Defender with scrolling worlds), showing progression of technology and gameplay complexity

    high · Eugene Jarvis categorizing video game eras and crediting Space War as underrated influencer of later arcade design

  • $

    market_signal: Defender's arcade revenue exceeded Pac-Man, signaling market appetite for complex, skill-intensive games with multiple controls despite (or because of) higher difficulty curve; represents shift in arcade gaming preferences

    high · Eugene Jarvis noting Defender 'outsold pac-man as far as grossing games'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Single-channel mono audio architecture on Williams arcade systems forced creative prioritization: designers had to choose which sound was most important at each moment, leading to impactful, dramatic audio that cut through arcade noise, contrasting with modern multi-channel mixing

    high · Eugene Jarvis: 'you could really hear it. It would cut through the cacophony of the arcade, and everything was going for the most important sound'

  • ?

    historical_signal: Virtual reality history: Ivan Sutherland's 1960s computerized VR system (3 fps, room-sized), 1990s Virtuality arcade VR (crude graphics, motion sickness), evolution toward modern stereoscopic headsets enabled by lightweight displays and computing power; represents 50+ year technology arc

    high · Eugene Jarvis tracing VR development from Sutherland through modern headsets, explaining hardware and software constraints at each era

    • We're going to go back a little bit because it was after UC Berkeley that you wound up at Atari and certainly fell in love with the gaming industry. Steve Ritchie was there. Here you guys are making Airborne Avengers and Superman. Go back to that 1977 year, and here now you're in the gaming business. Yeah, no, it was, I actually interviewed with Atari in the fall of 76, and they just, like, never got back to me. So I just figured, I mean, it was weird. I never thought of, like, calling them up or anything.
    3:14
    Just never got anything. So I go, okay, well, I guess that was that. and I would always I love the old godly electro mechanical pens back in the 70s what were your go to ones? I loved I guess Target Alpha was a big one and they had a lot of them it was like Skyzone they had a number of games and they reskinned games two and one player and four player all that stuff but I just love the drop target of thing, you know, just the drop targets and lots of shots, you know, and kind of more wide open games I enjoyed. And, you know, I probably spent way too much time playing pinball as a kid, you know, as a student, you know, when I should have been probably studying a little more. But and, you know, the free game thing was really cool in those days. It's kind of a big deal. Money was, you know, the income level was, you know, much lower in those days. and the Gottlieb games had kind of a jackpot effect where it was very difficult to light up the machine and get the specials lit and everything. But once you did, then you could win, if you had a great ball or something, you could win seven or eight games on one game. And then you could play for a half an hour for free. So it was a huge motivator when you didn't have a lot of cash was trying to hit that big game and play for free and sell your credit to the next guy that showed up. We've all done that. That's so true. I mean, we say it jokingly, but yeah, absolutely. We're not just going to turn it over. We were in these games. Maybe some more matches. Whatever. Weird. Exactly. And so that was, you know, I guess ball time was much shorter than those days, I think.
    5:00
    And out in California, actually, we played five ball. So when I came to, eventually I ended up in Chicago, I was like, what, three ball? Like, whatever, ball time? I mean, talk about inflation, man. It was like, oh, my God. But eventually I got used to the three-ball game. I guess it's much more exciting. It's less casual.
    5:20
    I mean, every ball is a big deal. Five balls, like, ah, dropped a couple balls, whatever. It wasn't as big of a deal if you drained quick. But at three balls, it was like a big deal. It might result in some broken glass or something. it was an interesting uh organization so i get to work um you know i'm just out of college then like a week later like the guy that hired me quit and then two weeks later his boss quit and so all of a sudden like i'm in charge of the department seriously that quickly yeah and i didn't know anything you know and uh things were going changing so fast i mean they were starting work on the BCS, which is the Video Computer System, the 2600 project. Oh, yeah. And so, you know, some of the programs were going over on that, and they actually had some kind of video phone project going on that I think the guy that hired me went to work on that. So it was, you know, all these big initiatives, you know, obviously video games we were taking off to. And so Pinball was kind of a, you know, maybe a backwater, actually. and they probably didn't have the A-level talent working there. That's how I ended up there. It's funny. Well, I don't know about that, but for Atari, I mean, really groundbreaking in a lot of ways, especially in the home console for the 2600 that you mentioned. They were kind of the Tesla of their era. They were like, screw everything that's been done before. Put it on a screen. You've got to go through a menu to hit your brakes on your cars. you know history we're changing everything you know and uh and so atari said well nobody really looks in the back glass the player doesn't look in the back glass right true you know you're playing the game you're looking down here so they said well why not put the score down in the left lower arch area um which was kind of a blank piece of battle in the old games and uh so you put the score down there and then it was like well you know all these switches you know rollover switches are very unreliable. They need a lot of maintenance, need a lot of adjustment. They put in magnetic, essentially kind of read-relay type things that would, when the ball rolled over, the magnetic force would close a switch. And so it was basically an electromagnetic ball sensor that sends the iron in the ball. And that was, you know, and so I was like, wow, man, this is the future, you know. They had, typical pinball flipper is a coil pulling on an arm, which then operates a lever to kick. It's kind of known as a linear solenoid. And they said, well, you're really trying to get a rotary motion on the flipper, so let's use this thing called a rotary solenoid, which was some kind of a solenoid that was on kind of a screwdriver kind of thing. So when it sucked in, it would turn circularly. and so I was like, man, we're redefining everything, all this little crap from Chicago, it's garbage. We're Silicon Valley. And they put the board, they put it at the bottom of the cabinet. I guess maybe it was easier to work on or something, I don't know. Then after a few months, their first pinball game was called the Atarians. Then all of a sudden the score panels started overheating because they didn't really have a vent there at the bottom of the game. the flippers, I guess, for some reason their ball bearings would fall out over time or something.
    8:56
    Then lock up and burn up. The electromagnetic sensors had to be very precisely a certain depth under the depth that they put it at, because there was only a certain range it would work in. I guess if you put it too high, then it would only sense very close. If you put it too deep, it wouldn't sense anything.
    9:16
    And so a lot of every now and then balls are going by the sensors and not scoring and then people forget oh they put a magnet in a pack of cigarettes and then it would be a fake pack of cigarettes because everybody smoked in those days and so then they just put that over the play field and start scoring guys and things there's my free game so it's like unfortunately and then the boards ended up inevitably screws out of the play field and falls down and they were falling down on the circuit boards, shorting out the circuit boards and blowing the boards up. So, you know, at the end of the day, all their great ambitions were just crash or crash. But, you know, and they obviously, they put some covers on things. You know, they had some fixes, but I don't know if they really recovered from that ever. No. But it was a pleasure working with Steve Ritchie. Sure. Who was, at the time I started, he was just the guy leaving the prototype lab. And then, like, all, you know, the other designers quit or something. so all of a sudden he's like the head designer you know it's like and uh and he always had this uh dream of you know making his own pinball game and you know he would you know he before he the other guys quit he you know we'd sit out in the parking lot you know and that night you know and he'd be telling you about you know you know we're gonna create these new games and you know blah and then eventually you know we'll go to chicago and it's like he had he had this whole thing figured out you know and uh and to me it just sounded like crazy dreams that is the guy in the prototype lab is going to be a great pinball designer like who would think about that you know did you think it was crazy or did you i mean you sure well i bought it i bought it yeah i bought it but i thought it was you know far-fetched but hey give it a shot you know and uh we did the uh airborne avenger and you know it was it was uh the first c richie playfield and And it was a pretty cool game for the era. And obviously Superman was probably his best game of that era and had some great shots and really good playing game with a great theme. And that game actually came out after he had left and also I had left. And then I guess a little while after that they shut down the whole department.
    11:33
    But it was fun. It was fun being kind of at the start of the whole solid-state pinball revolution. And the one thing we did really cool at Atari, we had some really great sounds on the games. And it was really, they had a great little sound synthesizer. And, you know, I kind of learned how to program that and created some really great sounds. And kind of started the whole wave toward, you know, electronic synthesized sounds as opposed to bells and chimes and things like that. Back when these games were in the arcades, are these getting heard? Because everything's making noise. I mean, now in the home market, you can certainly hear these games, hear these wonderful sounds, these innovations. But what was it like in the arcades? Well, you know, see, because this was largely pre-electronic, and even the electronic games still had chimes and bells and stuff. So these electronic sounds I mean just turn the volume up and people go what the hell is that man It sounds like you playing Star Wars on a pinball game And so people freaked out They just loved that The sound is almost like in a track mode. Like, what's that over there? Yeah. And it draws your head and there you see it. Right. I mean, today every game has pretty great sounds. But at that era, it was like, oh, my God, it's not like a doorbell chime. You know, this is like, you know, this is incredible, you know, space sounds and different things coming out of the game. That's the key. It's different because the chimes, there are only so many notes you can play with chimes, right? Exactly. Whereas these are unique. So that's cool. You mentioned you followed this madman with this crazy idea, Steve Ritchie, who, you know, when we think of the games we love, it's why many of us got into pinball. But he goes over to Williams and you follow him and there you get firepower. I want to know what it was like when you first heard the idea for his firepower Yeah, so you know, and Steve, both Steve and I you know, we wanted to kind of press you know, we had this new thing, so I'll say pinball what could it do? We saw how sound could be so interesting and Steve had actually gone to Williams, I think it was in 1978 and did a game there with a programmer named Randy Pfeiffer, who was a really brilliant programmer called Flash and I think that game really I think defined the future of pinball you know the audio in that game was a step above I mean Williams it was interesting like they really didn't know anything about solid state electronics they knew something about electronics but they didn't really know anything about sound and so they just decided well we'll put a microprocessor and some memory and a digital analog computer and make your own devs So there was no oscillator. A lot of the other systems, they had little oscillators and kind of a commercial sound chip. I think there was something like GEI, General Instrument, blah, blah, blah, sound chip, which used in a lot of games over that era. But with the microprocessor, you could create any incredible sound you wanted to. It was a huge pain in the ass. But basically, Randy had developed some cool sounds, and I spent some time developing synthesizer programs for this. We could only make one sound at a time, which was good and bad. You know, it's like you had to have a priority system to determine what sound was the best sound at the time. But you'd have the entire volume for every sound. So, you know, you could really have a lot of impact on the player. It wasn't like you had 27 channels of audio and everything's, you know, you can't hear anything. And you really had to do everything at one sound. That was the most important sound happening at the time. This is different in the development of pinball and gaming, for sure, because I think of rock music, whether they're recording in mono, and now you've got stereo. You've got Jimi Hendrix, who can do absolutely everything, but he's only got a four-track studio. And now you've got this microprocessor where you can put a lot in there, but a lot more time has to go in there. Yeah, but it's a one-track studio. Yeah. But it was kind of cool. It's kind of like AM radio. It's like everything is full on. So you could really hear it. It would cut through the cacophony of the arcade, and everything was going for the most important sound. The sound was super important for the development of electronic pinball because often in a pinball game, the ball's bouncing around. Nothing's happening. You miss this shot, it bounces here, there. There's a lot of dead air. Like in radio, dead air is the curse of the world. Oh, I know. You don't want to tune into a radio station and hear nothing. You're going to go, oh, they're off the air. So basically we thought of ways to, some of the early games we had a lot of echoey sounds. So it would be like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, da-da-da-da-da. And so that would cover a lot of kind of stretching out the sounds. And Steve actually had the idea to create a background sound. So this was actually in the game Flash, I think. and it would kind of rise in tension level as the ball went longer and longer, and hopefully you were scoring less points. And so it would add this kind of get into a frenzy, you know, where, like, you've got all the bonus loaded, and you're shooting for the special or whatever, and, you know, you've got to get the last letter, and you're, you know, you're just like, ah, you know, and the sound's like, bleh. So it was very, it added to the kind of the tension and the excitement of the game. And so this whole background sound thing became very, very important. And so when I got back to Chicago, it was like, okay, what game should we do? And what's the next thing? And basically, it was kind of obvious. I mean, I always loved the old Bally pinballs of the, I think it was like of the early to mid-70s, the electromechanicals. They had a number of games that were multi-ball games. and I remember like Fireball and I think Wizard and some other games of that era and extremely complicated you know, electromechanical systems and I don't know if they ever really worked that well but they were really fun games and so I was like, let's do a multi-ball game in the electronic era and so that was the idea behind Fireball and more noise, more sound More volume, more action. And so the idea was to create a... And it was interesting. It was like normally a pinball game, it's all about a score.
    18:07
    This is more about a moment. Right, exactly. And so this was more about you're creating an event. And it's not just points. And so we had this whole... We had to lock these three balls to create the multi-ball thing. and they would kick him out, and this whole choreographed sequence with lights, and even in the score displays, there would be a countdown. So it was kind of like doing this whole multimedia event and using every sounds and lights and off-limit displays to create some huge event, and this was attaining the multiball. It's just interesting, some 45 years later, that even with pinball today, multi-ball is still an event. In fact, a lot of the new games now give you that multi-ball within three or four shots just to give you that event, give some sort of satisfaction. Exactly. What starts out as a really, really big deal inevitably, what do you do next? I'll give it to him cheaper. I'll give it to him multi-ball every ball. It's like, you're taking all this. What's the next thing? In Firepower, it was like, you've got a multi-ball, I don't know. If you were really good, maybe... It's not an easy multi-ball to get. Right. Yeah. If you were really good, maybe every few games. Or if you were great, you might be able to do it almost every other game or something. But you certainly wouldn't get it multiple times in a game. I mean, it's possible, but it would be rare. But you see someone do it, and you want to do it. Exactly. So you keep pumping quarters, and now it's only three balls, and that firepower's got a curved left lane. You're not going to be able to in-out that one. So there's all these factors that make you keep coming back for more. If the flippers were weak, it could be Yeah, that's true. There was a shot, the upper block, and that was very hard to hit if your right flipper didn't have the power. But, yeah, so the interesting thing is people would, actually, the guys, you know, I think people in the field would play out the ball, but there were some people inside of Williams that would call it a V-ball. So, like, you would get the multi-ball, and then they would just kind of, like, walk away and peace, you know, make a V-side. And it's kind of like the mic drop or something. Yeah, yeah. Like, yep, boom, I did it. Bye. You know, like. Isn't that funny? And that was kind of an interesting thing of the V-Ball, you know. So there were other games, obviously, with Steve at Williams, too. F-14 Tomcat comes to mind. Yeah, yeah. But Williams, because of what you and I and everybody saw in Space Invaders, went, oh, boy, this is something new. this might someday replace pinball and in many ways it did for quite some time so williams kind of wants to shift more into that field and you do as well i can only imagine like to me and for people listening to this podcast you know 30 years ago we first really got our hands on the internet and things have changed and they and they're about to change again with ai in the next 12 months or so but when that switch in this gaming industry when space invaders is there and you only had pinball before oh boy this is uh this is the future of gaming well you know i obviously um i think diehard pinball guys would would object to your analysis there you have to take the video game no no i mean videos were cool but uh when we went in this era it wasn't we weren't thinking of video replacing pinball it was just a an expansion of the industry you know it was like It's just another fun game to play. Just like you have basketball, you have football or something. True. It's just another really cool thing.
    21:48
    And there was, obviously, in a video game, it can be anything. You know what I mean? A pinball game is kind of a pinball. You can theme it, but at the end of the day, it's flippers and balls and stuff like that. And a video game might be, I mean, you could have a video pinball that's flippers and balls, but you're flying an airplane, you're driving a car, you're doing Call of Duty. you know you're doing a sports simulator i mean it could be any theme and the gameplay is vastly different between different genres of video games but at the time it was just like hey this is a cool thing you know and you know it's kind of kind of a the programmer at that era you become the designer too so i don't have to like be you know working with somebody like steve richie you know who's could be very stubborn and opinionated and it's like i just what the hell i want to do You know, and it's funny, Steve was very hard on programmers. It was like it's been heard once or twice. But, you know, it was part it's part of his, you know, if you're trying to do a revolution, you can't like, you know, take no for an answer. You know, it's like I remember when I started Atari, actually, the prior programmer had told everybody that it was impossible to flash a light in a pinball game. and at that time, you know, it was like nobody understood computers, and somebody said, well, you can't do that on a computer. They would think, all right, I guess you can't do it, you know, and so I remember like after like my first week, I like flashed a light or something, and everybody goes, oh, my God, this guy's a genius. He flashed a light, you know, and – Were they saying you can't do it because it hadn't been done? Is that really why they're saying that? I think they were – a lot of times programmers, if they don't feel like doing something or I think it's too much work, let me see how that can be done. You know what I mean? It's kind of like, we call it kind of like the pocket veto, where you're just like, you know, oh, yeah, man, that's just not possible. You know, like people had, you know, it's just like AI. You know, like if you're talking to some AI expert and he goes, you know, AI, you know, it really can't, it's never going to be able to, like, drive cars without killing people or something, you know. And then you're going to go, oh, maybe you're right. And it's like, you know.
    23:58
    Well, that's something I can imagine. you just can't say to an innovator is that here you are, you come up with an idea and someone says, no, you can't do that. Well, if I came up with the idea, some way, somehow we can do that. We put a man on the moon. We do everything, you know? But it's always, you know, how much time, how much money. But it can be done. Well, anything can be done, but it's more of a practical verdict. You know, like, it's not possible for us, you know, with our budget and our hardware and this, that, and the other and blah, blah, blah. And sometimes, you know, it's right. You can't do it. I'm trying not to jump all over the place, but I just think of you as one of the biggest pioneers and innovators. And we're going to go back and forth a little bit here because you kind of had that idea of really virtual reality, what we have now, the VR systems. And the idea was there, maybe difficult to do, but we got to see it with different screens. I think of Cruise and I think of some of the other wonderful things of Raw Thrills. So it just took a while to get there but you had that thought a long time ago Yeah actually the first virtual reality system was a computerized virtual reality system was actually in the late 1960s done by a guy named Ivan Sutherland in the University of Utah I think it might have been Harvard. He was at both places. And it was very crude and black and white and so forth. But that dream was, it is a great dream Star Trek, which was before that. They were talking about the holodeck. So it was a dream even before electronics, that somehow you could transport yourself to a new world and look around and you're there. But it was just finally getting realized in real life. But obviously the first system was extremely crude. The frame rate was very poor. The apparatus was like the size of a room. The frame rate was, you know, like three frames a second or something. So, you know, it's been a technological battle to get powerful enough computers, graphically powerful displays, you know, that don't weigh, you know, 4,000 pounds. I mean, try to strap a CRT to your eyeball. Yeah. Good luck. Good luck with that. So, I mean, it's only been, you know, obviously with the advent of, you know, liquid crystal displays and LED displays and, you know, very lightweight flat screen things that headset thing became practical. And then you need just the computing power to do a fully fleshed out world. But, I mean, there was a big VR boom in the 1980s and 90s. I don't know if you remember that. There was a thing called Virtuality, which was actually a corn-up VR game. Really? And it was extremely crude graphics, but you put it on your headset, and it kind of got you sick, and all the normal things that VR does.
    26:54
    But that was kind of a big deal in the 90s. Actually, there was a lot of installations of that around the world. The closest thing I remember, it was a tank game, Battlezone or something like that. You looked through it. Well, yeah, that was, yeah. Battletongue was, I mean, it was a 3D video game. Sure, sure. You know, the VR was the, I mean, obviously a video simulator is kind of a VR device. Sure. But it has a limited field of view. So then we, you know, we got to the 3D stuff, but VR is also a stereoscopic image that's a different image for each eye, so you see actually depth. And so, yeah, so, you know, I guess video games have been evolving toward VR. certainly like in the 90s we got into 3d driving simulators and you know fighting games um the first person shooters all that stuff and uh you know and today uh finally we have the you know stereoscopic tech but you do have to put on this face mask you know and everybody's you know hope for someday you don't have to stick something on your face just put a a wire into your head or something yeah or whatever but um like minority report exactly exactly people come up with these ideas the biggest difficulty was time well in your time at williams you know as this is now moving into video games you created a game that outsold pac-man as far as grossing games and it's defender and defender had everything we've just talked about the sounds were unbelievable but more than just a simple joystick, left, right, shoot. There were a lot of different buttons. You now had to be a lot more coordinated to play a game like Defender, and that really was a game changer. Yeah, so Defender, you know, it was kind of, I think it was kind of really almost a second generation of video games of that golden age. The first generation would have been like Space Invaders,
    28:45
    and there was a game Asteroids. Oh, yeah. Missile Command. Right, Missile Command. And then there was also a really interesting game, which I don't think has been gotten enough credit given to it, is a game called Space War. Which it's basically, Asteroid kind of ripped it off to some extent. It was a player versus player shooting game, deathmatch kind of thing. And two players simultaneously battling. Originally it was done on a vector display. and it ended up it was designed actually in the early 1960s if you can believe it running on large what was known as mini computers at the time but they're quite big and mainframe systems and really only existed on college campuses for many years because it was the only place that had big computers that could run this thing they had gravity it had actually it did have one asteroid but you couldn't destroy it.
    29:47
    But it was this really awesome momentum. It was kind of a physics-based game. Very exciting. Very fun game. And that kind of led to Asteroids. So we were getting kind of great 2D kind of simulators. And so Defender was kind of in that thing. But the whole thing about Defender was all the early games you were stuck on a screen. Defender, we wanted to have the feeling of flight. that rush you get from just ripping down through the universe at Mach 7. So to do that, we did a scrolling world. The map. Yeah. It was what was called a wraparound world. So games like Asteroids and also Space War use the wraparound on one screen. So if you go off the left side of the screen, you come on the right side of the screen. If you go off the top, you come in on the bottom. And so it makes the game a little more fluid and exciting. and you feel like you're not trapped in a box. Yeah, but you're just kind of like going from one end of the box. You know, like you're kind of wrapping around into the box, but that felt better. But Defender was like, okay, let's have, I think Defender had a world that was like, I think three and a half screens approximately, and you'd fly around this basically planetary surface, and the aliens were coming in, and so it kind of had that bigger world, and then you have a scanner that would show you enemies where they were in this bigger world. And then the other concept in Defender that was kind of exciting was rather than just somebody in the early games, you just go out there and you just kill them. It's like, you know, things show up, you kill them. And the idea was, how about having a friend in the game? You know, something that a friend of yours or rather than just killing everything, there's something you actually want to save. and so the defender has you have the astronauts who are you know i guess exploring this world or something and they um start getting kidnapped by the aliens and so you're trying to protect your friends you know and uh they'd be kidnapped by the alien ship and you could shoot this alien ship and they would drop the guy and you could you better catch it and you would catch him or he would you know if he fell too far um he would you know blow up when he hit the ground it had a lot of dynamic. It was a much more complicated gameplay because you didn't know if you're... Space Invaders is like, I'm here, what do you do? I kill things. Left, right, shoot. That's it. Defender, you've got to... At a young age, when I had a little more dexterity and a little more coordination, you had to really be able to juggle. Yeah, and it was mentally like, do I save this guy or is he a lost cause? There's three or more guys getting kidnapped over here. Do I save them? How far away am I from them? If I just shoot, do I just try to stay alive? What is my number one priority right now? So it added a great complexity to the gameplay so all these different kind of things would happen, all these different kind of incidents. And it basically was based on random dispatch of things and random groups being dispatched. And so you had just all kinds of incredible situations which show up that if you were a good player or if you dealt with it correctly, you can survive just almost indescribable situations. And so it was incredibly exciting and always new because it was always different. Every game, the action was different and unique. Defender, then we get Stargate, and it's just Defender on steroids. And then being able to use the controllers in a different way. Forget all that. Buttons? We don't need buttons. We got Robotron here. Here's two joysticks. Are you left-handed or right-handed? You better be both. like that's but robotron i remember playing that game with lime and sheets in fact that was one of my favorite games whenever we see it yeah so robotron is just a fun fun game but it was again we've never saw anything like this this is another innovation yeah so robot it's interesting so after doing defender and stargate it was kind of like you know what's next what you know what's the new cool thing to do you know and what would be completely different from those games and i'd really uh gotten into uh a game earlier game called berserk and oh yeah and you you're fighting robots and i i was i was into this the robot thing and the you know now we're talking about ai taking over the world i mean we're talking about robots ai taking over the world in you know 1982 and it was like i enjoyed the game but i felt very like i just felt like the controls weren't powerful enough you know you you had to you know you only had one one joystick you could move and then shoot at something or run away but you couldn't like run away and shoot back at something at the same time you know you couldn't like just uh move and like just spread a fire across the screen you were stuck shooting in the direction you were traveling and so it became very um and last time you know you'd kind of travel you have to travel closer to things that are going to kill you to shoot them you know and it was a extremely challenging game but i just felt like as a player I felt somewhat frustrated. I felt how odd if we really gave somebody the ability to, you know, move independently and move and fire independently. And, you know, thinking about different ways, like having some different buttons, like having all the buttons. And then finally, I was obsessed, like there had to be a button to fire with. But then all of a sudden I realized, like, wait a minute, you could fire with a joystick, you know, because you're just because that's just hitting buttons. Right. And so once I got over that mental block, I realized, well, just put two joysticks in the game. You know, that's all you need. And it was just like magic when I did that. It's funny. I had a proto cabinet and I got two Atari 2600 joysticks and I bolted them down to this piece of wood, you know, to like a defender control panel. And just, you know, and I had just the grunts going. I think it took me a few days to just get the grunts going and basically their algorithm was very simple they just came for you that's it, they would just go in your direction and when they touched you obviously they would kill you and so just that very simple play mechanic was just incredibly fun and all I had to do I created five grunts and like oh my god how about 20, how about 100 and then all of a sudden oh my god this is insane And then like saving astronauts in Defender, you've got to save people on RoboCop. Right, right. But another element. Right. So to save the human race, I guess you're saving your family. The last human family. I don't know who you're going to reproduce with.
    36:40
    But anyway, you're saving your family. So that was, again, you had that different motivation. Do I shoot a robot? Do I run away from the robot? Do I save my family? And so the family had this progressive scoring thing to really would kind of stolen from Pac-Man.
    37:00
    And which a lot, you know, like the more guys you save, the more you're scoring. It becomes, so really it tries to encourage really reckless behavior and risking your life to save the humans. And these early games, I mean, the graphics is super primitive. And it was really about gameplay in those days. It was all about gameplay. It wasn't, you know, because the systems just weren't capable of moving a lot of pixels. So it was how do you make things interesting Defender the big revolutionary thing was scrolling through multiple screens around this world and here in robotron it was like we back to just confinement yeah total confinement and so but it's interesting how that is an incredibly but you have a lot of fire power and but it's incredibly like the tension is insane because you're kind of oh yeah you're getting and the sounds right right right and and the sounds you know they're all pretty much Defender sounds. And actually from Firepower. Most of those games use Firepower sounds. And, you know, we shamelessly recycled them. They were good. You know, it held like 30 good sounds. Sure. And it would create a few other new ones, but mostly just repackaged sounds from the Fire games. So these games, and we mentioned Defender, outsold, outgrossed coins being played than Pac-Man. Robotron, same thing for sure. And these are getting more quarters than pinball machines, and this is kind of the way we're going. Well, let's fast forward. I can tell you from many operators now right here at Raw Thrills, the games you make today are licenses to print money for many operators. You know what? If you're wanting to bite the bullet, do it, and then you just watch the money roll in. And it's certainly a higher level than pinball at this stage. Pinball has kind of changed in a way to a home market. Right. Although there's more interest today, there's kind of a revolution, certain revolutions in pinball. And it's really interesting in that our buddy Josh Sharp has been working with, what is it, AAPA or APBA? Where the hell is it? IFPA. The IFPA. Okay. The IFPA. And so you have this grassroots. I love it. It's not like manufacturers paying the money. It's like the people themselves. The players themselves are organizing to run their own tournaments. And obsessed with it. And obsessed. And creating a whole worldwide rankings, a world championship of pinball. And it's amazing how this has grown. Just pinball players having their own tournaments, and it's incredible. And I think there's, I don't know, 120,000 IFPA members. Yeah, 120,000 ranked players. And grows exponentially, too. When I signed up 10 years ago, there were 20,000, 23,000. You see this, obviously, with the big buck hunter competitions that are massive as well, too. Right, right, right. So there's something that Raw Thrills has done. They found the secret sauce. It's kind of like KFC. It's that addictive chemical that makes you crave it nightly, as they say in So I Married an Axe Murderer. But these games are addictive, whether it's Fast and Furious, whether it's your latest, which is Pulp Fiction Pinball. You're back in the pinball game, Eugene. Well, yeah. And my buddy really do do it. My friends are with Play Mechanics. Yes. And George Petro, who I guess actually programmed that game too. And he was a big pinball programmer back in the 80s. Now he's back doing some pinball again pretty amazingly. And that's interesting. It's kind of a very strange project. I remember when George was like, yeah, I've got a line with Tarantino, and we're going to do Pulp Fiction pinball. And like, wow, that's so cool. I mean, the guy's really hard to get a hold of. I mean, he would call you back, and his secretary would call you back like nine months later or something.
    41:08
    Got to get him at the right time. It's like me getting in this interview with you. Right, and then I remember the contract had this clause like approvals. You know, like Mr. Tarantino has to approve everything that's done, and if you submit approval, we can't guarantee that he will even look at it. We can't guarantee that he will either authorize or unauthorize it. He may never get back to you.
    41:34
    And, you know, we're just going, this is a very interesting contract. well whether it's mark ritchie whether it's josh whether it's george the original designs of pulp fiction were something a little more modern like pinball machines are now with the lcd screens and quentin came back to noah and the artwork and everything else was kind of changed to this this retro look that quentin wanted and it wound up making the game better because like you said at the start of this interview you don't look up at the play field when you're playing pinball so you're looking down and you're hearing all of these incredible callouts when they talk about Pulp Fiction, first of all, plays great, but it sounds amazing. Yeah, and it's all the great music from the classic movie. And, you know, it was so, you know, but we were kind of aghast when he said, like, oh, this has got to be a classic 70s game. No displays, you know, no in fact, the scores have to look like, you know, an old retro pinball machine. No TVs, you know, and it was like, God, is anybody in like, how many are we going to sell? Like 10? You know, at the time it was like, is this just a death sentence? You know, and, but somehow it was like, you know, just the love of that movie and that era, you know, how to, you know, it was like, well, maybe it seems like the guy is completely insane, but you know what? Maybe he's right. You know, maybe he's right. I mean, it seems like a long shot, but it It just seemed like it was worth it because it's such a powerful movie and it's such a great story. What a blessing in disguise. Yeah. And so we bought into it. And, I mean, you've got to hats off to the guys at Chicago Gaming Company, Doug Duba and his crew over there. You know, just the love they put into a lot of these. Just the special castings they put in there. They had a special for the LE edition. They have this special retro coin door. Great build quality, too. metal casting. Yeah, the quality is, I mean, Doug and his crew are obsessed with quality. And, you know, it may take them, you know, I don't know, it's taken them like, I don't know, five or six years to get one built. So, you know, maybe at some day, you know, people might be able to buy this. I think they can. No, no, they're out in the wild for sure. In fact, I'm running a tournament where Pulp Fiction's in the game. So it's good.
    43:58
    You are an innovator and pioneer to so many people. somebody had to be whether it was a mentor for you whether it's back at Berkeley or whatever it was who was the one that kind of put that vision in your head that said I can do anything don't take no for an answer you know I think I mean I always was kind of a somewhat creative guy and wanted to follow my own course you know but I think it was really Steve Ritchie that inspired me and we were both kind of learning at the same time because the industry was so new there was nobody to really mentor you you're just figuring it out and so I think Nolan Bushnell obviously was inspiring and what he had done with Atari and that whole thing and kind of just rolling the dice on things and taking a chance and so I think also the whole Nolan's whole attitude and the whole attitude of Atari of like, let's reinvent the universe. You know, a lot of possible universes don't sell. But when you do it, sometimes you'll create something incredibly new and it will strike a chord with people. And so it was kind of that 70s spirit of like, I mean, it was interesting at the time. It was like anything was possible. You know, we went to the moon. you know now there's you know all these new things video games you know pin you know electronic but just everything was exploding personal computers and it was like you know what if you don't like what's going on you know you don't like the game you're playing make your own damn game you know and so it was just like it was like and i can do this you know like it was like rather than saying oh you know to make a video game oh you need millions of dollars and you need all those budgets and all this crap and it's impossible i'm just a peon i can't do this and at that time it was like yeah anybody can do this stuff you know and partly because the industry was so new and fresh that it was only you can only you know two or three guys could change the world you know which you would say you know with all the big giant corporations and everything sometimes it feels like the individual inventor is is hopeless but even today it seems like most of the great new inventions or small teams of people. You've almost answered my next question in the sense that you're very charitable and you give back to so many schools and whatnot. I wonder what you tell some of the up-and-coming designers and developers. Maybe it's just that. If you can dream it, it can maybe happen. I think it's to go ahead and do it.
    46:40
    Don't figure out how impossible it is, but go ahead and do it. Get a team of people in it. It's interesting with the internet today i mean there's like virtual teams of people all over the world you know where you get like somebody in finland somebody you don't have to meet each other in hong kong and somebody in india and you get together on a project and and do something and it's amazing what people have done just on their own i mean you think about like wikipedia which you know it was just people writing their own damn articles you know and and everybody's like oh this is how's this gonna work you know it's gonna be garbage and you know there's gonna be full of errors and it's all It's crap and blah, blah, blah. And here, like, where do we go to? Wikipedia. I don't go to encyclopedias on my shelf like I did in the 70s. Yeah. But, I mean, it's amazing. And this is just the power of a volunteer group of people. I mean, similar to the IFPA. Well. And, you know, there's so much, like, open source software, you know, the whole Linux thing. It's like all these things started with two or three people, and they didn't have a lot of money. They were just, you know, working in their spare time or something. So this idea that you need billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars to do something is BS. You can start yourself and do something cool. We talk about your charity work, and my last question for you is maybe your biggest charity ever is your CFO in Josh Sharp.
    48:00
    Let's do a performance evaluation on Josh, shall we? Oh, man. He's an amazing dude. And, you know, I don't know, you know, when I started the company, I was like the CFO and the purchasing manager and the chief designer and bottle washer. You know, I wouldn't be here today if I was still trying to do those four jobs. And I realized I was doing like five jobs really bad, you know. And I got Josh and he's done a great job here at Rothwells, but he's probably done even greater things for pinball, you know, and the IFPA. Well, he has told me he owes everything to you, Eugene, and everything that you've allowed him to do with Raw Thrills, with IFPA even, and with Pulp Fiction Pinball. So it's a good partnership for sure. Yeah, no, it's a great guy, and Raw Thrills wouldn't be here without him. Thank you very much for your time. I can't believe I got all this time from you, and you're so busy. I'll send you a birthday card on our birthday. Thanks very much, Eugene. There you go. Thanks. Hey, thanks, Jeff. We hope you enjoyed episode number 400 and our special guest, Eugene Jarvis. Thank you very much, Eugene, and for Josh Sharp for setting that up. Really appreciate it. Do we do 400 more? Sure. Why not? Let's do it. With your help, patreon.com slash pinball profile. Thank you to Fox City's Pinball, Erica's Pinball Journey, Albert A., Cliff A., Bart V., Sean I., Derek S., Stefan R., David M., Derek K., and Colin M. You and others have made this possible. Thank you. You can get everything on pinballprofile.com or on Facebook, Instagram, X at pinballprofile, and please email pinballprofile at gmail.com. I'm Jeff Teoles.