Through the Stargate

At the time of Defender‘s release, Eugene Jarvis is making about $40,000 a year as a salaried employee at Williams. As his creation begins bringing in an obscene amount of money for the company, Jarvis feels he should be compensated for his work. Williams’ offering, a cash bonus and stock options spread out over four years, does not appease him. Amid the swirl of chaos in the wake of Defender‘s smash success and the subsequent influx of designers and technicians into the company, Jarvis walks and with DeMar forms video game design company Vid Kidz in April of 1981 in Chicago. But despite the rather insulting salary offer Williams has presented, the two don’t want to create games for anyone other than their former employer and they rebuff offers from other videogame distributors, almost immediately entering into an agreement with Williams to manufacture and distribute Vid Kidz games. The first product on the slate is the Defender sequel Stargate, released in 1981 and later renamed Defender II for legal reasons. If people at the 1980 AMOA thought Defender was too complicated to be a success, one wonders what they must have thought of its sequel, featuring an astounding six buttons, controlling reverse, thrust, fire, hyperspace and the new Inviso cloaking device…used to render the ship indestructible for a short period of time. The Stargates of the title are portals onscreen that if entered while a human is being kidnapped will warp the player to the scene of the attack. The game carefully retains the play value of the original, but added are a number of new enemies to destroy, and the evil alien attackers now have names, such as the Irata and Yllabain…which by some strange coincidence happen to contain the names of Williams’ competition spelled backward. Also present is an improved colour palette adding new spice to the graphics. Shipping near the end of 1981, only 26,000 machines are eventually sold, still a solid success but seen as a disappointment to Jarvis who considers the sequel superior to the original in many respects.

Stargate, Defender sequel

Robotron: 2084 in the arcade

Welcome Our New Robotron Overlords

Next from Vid Kidz comes Robotron: 2084 in 1982, originally called Robot War: 1984 while under development. Its groundbreaking control scheme features two joysticks; one for moving the onscreen character around and another for firing. Berzerk provides inspiration for the game and its two sticks; Jarvis likes Stern’s product but is frustrated by only being able to fire in the direction the character is moving. With the extra joystick at his disposal, the player can fire in eight directions while running from the enemy. More inspiration comes from Chase, a turn-based computer game on the Commodore PET and other early micro-computers, which has the player escape a swarm of surrounding, zeroing-in robots by moving in such as way as to make them blow up by running into walls or themselves. Midway’s coin-op Omega Race is another genus game for Jarvis and Robotron, with the idea of the player being swarmed by enemies, who in Midway’s game drop mines to be either avoided or destroyed. Robotron also sports a fairly complex SF plotline, taking place in the future with a species of robots known as Robotrons finally fed-up with the liabilities of humans, who they try to wipe from the planet. The hero, a genetic freak “superhuman”, must save the final vestiges of humanity from a cornucopia of evil machines. While trying to survive the onslaught, players are tasked with picking up members of “the last human family”. Said (vastly extended} family consisting of Mommy, Daddy and little son Mikey, so named after the sullen, silent kid in the then-ubiquitous Life cereal TV commercials who usually “hates everything”.

Initially, the design of the game hews closely to its Berzerkian influence, with the player navigating a huge underground environment with corridors and a central controlling station. Once Jarvis realizes the kind of time it would take to realize this vision, the idea is pared down to something more reasonable. In the finished product, at the beginning of every new screen players are placed in the centre of an open, barren arena, surrounded by a multitude of enemies who quickly begin swarming towards him. Things get so crazy on the screen, with so many entities rushing around firing their weapons, that Williams develops a 1MHz chip just to be able to run Robotron. And in the fine tradition of loud Williams games, Robotron sports lots of cabinet shaking sound effects, in an attempt to get the player sweating in a Pavlovian response to the noisy mayhem. Graphically, the game moves extremely fast. Developed for Robotron is a revolutionary bit blitter graphics technology, allowing large amounts of data to be moved quickly around memory addresses. Many in the design team, including one RJ Mical, eventually end up working on the colour handheld Handy project for Epyx, and then on the truly revolutionary Amiga computer. After a rousing reception during its unveiling at a meeting for Williams distributors  immediately prior to the 1982 Amusement Operators Expo in Chicago, upon release Williams sells 19,000 Robotron units, a good showing considering its departure from the Defender formula. It is named as the 4th most popular video arcade game in the U.S. by Play Meter magazine in the early summer of 1982. Williams also draw the ire of Disney, who file a lawsuit in Federal Court in Chicago which states that the name Robotron  infringes on their copyright to the title of their flop movie Tron, released the same year. 

Breakup and NARC Raids

The 4th chapter in the Defender series, Blaster (1983), is a flop for Vid Kidz. Only 500 machines are produced due to its expensive 3D graphics hardware featuring sprite scaling, allowing objects to grow in size creating the feeling of foward movement. The equipment is offered inside a practically indestructible Duramold polyethylene cabinet that makes the whole shebang around 25% lighter than traditional arcade game housing. Limited quantities of a traditional wooden cabinet is also offered for the game, along with an exceedingly rare sit-down cockpit version. Blaster is the final game by Vid Kidz, as the team drifts apart as DeMar moves back into pinball, and along with Pat Lawlor goes on to design the Addams Family game in 1992 for Williams, which becomes the best-selling solid-state pinball game of all time.

Eugene Jarvis with Blaster graphics, 1984

The exceedingly rare Blaster arcade game cockpit cabinet, 1983

Williams Electronics booth at 1983 AOE

Designers Larry DeMar (r) and Pat Lawlor celebrate the Addams Family pinball becoming the best seller of all time, 1992 image

Addam’s Family pinball game creators Larry DeMar (far left) and Pat Lawlor accept Play Meter award for best pinball game, 1994 ceremony.

Jarvis goes back to school, getting his masters degree from Stanford University in 1986. Williams has other hits outside of the Vid Kidz team, including Joust (1982) by John Newcomer and Bill Pfutzenreuter, with art for the game done by pioneering computer graphics designer John Hendricks, née Janice Hendricks. Williams also makes classic 1982 speech synthesis game Sinistar, who’s programmers include Sam Dicker, he of the great Defender sound effects, and the game includes some startling voice-synthesized taunting from the evil title character. Also on board for Sinistar is R.J. Mical; Dicker would later help Mical on development of the Amiga computer. Mical would work on the impressive multi-tasking system for Amiga called Intuition, and Dicker on the computer’s sound and MIDI capabilities.

A fittingly magnificent poster for one of the best arcade games of the 80’s, 1982’s Joust

Atari announces Joust for their 2600 and 5200 consoles, 1983

Janice Hendricks, designer of the graphics for Williams’ Joust

Moon Patrol arcade game flyer. Designed by Irem, distributed in NA by Williams Electronics, 1982

It lives! A sinisterly lit image of the Sinistar cockpit in this 1983 trade ad

Upon graduation from Stanford Jarvis returns to Williams, develops the Z-Unit videogame system, and a game to go with it called NARC (1989), which heralds Williams’ return to the videogame market after their purchase by Midway. The arcade game itself is heralded at a Williams presentation as a run-up to the 1988 AMOA convention; during its unveiling, “elite” team members emerge from the stage and shoot pellets at the audience. NARC is also highly successful, so much so that it helps bring arcade videogames out of a slump in the late 80’s. It is one of the first arcade games to utilize the powerful 32-bit Texas Instrument 34010 graphics/CPU chip. This blistering hardware is used to serve a blatant anti-drug tirade to players, while at the same time taking a more liberal stance against video game violence: the player-controlled narcotics officer strolls down the street mowing down suspected drug pushers, with a carefully placed bazooka shot sending a shower of bloody limbs and burning bodies into the air. All this mayhem is personalized via the use of digitized actors for the game characters and images of real vehicles for the Narc’s rides, a pioneering process that Midway would utilize to further notorious effect a few years later in their game Mortal Kombat and various sequels. In 1990 comes Smash TV, little more than a technically enhanced Robotron, and High Impact Football the same year.

Say NO to drugs, YES to a little ultraviolence, in Eugene Jarvis’ arcade game NARC, 1989

Midway’s Mortal Kombat continued the use of digitized actors pioneered in NARC. Click on the botton to play the arcade version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3

The Fate of Williams Electronics and Eugene Jarvis

Under the umbrella of the WMS Industries holding company, formed in 1985, Williams Electronics enters the slot machine business in 1992. After the purchase of Tradewest in 1994, this video game development company is renamed Williams Entertainment, Inc, responsible for the development and distribution of console and computer video games. The company helps spur on a trend of 3D adaptations of classic arcade games to 90’s consoles when it releases Robotron X for the PlayStation and N64 in the later part of the decade. Having absorbed Midway in 1988, the game is released by Williams under the Midway label. With the graphics given the 3D treatment, the frenetic action and full view of the playfield enjoyed in the original arcade game suffers, and the console update fails to quicken the pulse of many gamers. Time-Warner Interactive, the owner of Atari Games, is purchased by WMS on March 29, 1996, at a reported price of $25 million. Midway is spun off to shareholders in 1998, continuing as an independently owned and operated company. WMS eventually both shuts down Atari Games and leaves the waning pinball market in 1999.

Ad for video games by Williams Entertainment, 1996

Cruis’n USA, by Eugene Jarvis and Midway, 1994

Eugene Jarvis’ later efforts include the best-selling Cruis’n racing games he creates for Midway. Cruis’n USA is released in 1994 and Cruis’n World in 1996. Both are also big successes in the arcade, as well as ports to Nintendo’s N64 home console. Jarvis is one of the very few game creators from the golden arcade days still producing today, founding the Raw Thrills label in 2001, and still enjoying great success to boot. 

1996 ad for Robotron X, Williams Entertainment

A bird-brained ad for classic arcade video game Joust, by Williams 1982