Slashdot Mirror
Jarvis On Robotron, Defender, Acolytes
Koworld writes "The videogaming webzine, Way of the Rodent, has a new interview with videogame legend Eugene Jarvis, whose forthcoming arcade comeback was recently covered on Slashdot Games. He talks at length about his gaming philosophy, arguing: 'All the best videogames are about survival - it's our strongest instinct, stronger than food, sex, lust for money... You have to create a survival story - to tap into the raw energy and adrenaline and get people naturally excited. Sounds obvious, but that's why you need a LOT of very nasty bad guys trying to kill you.' The site also features other Eugene Jarvis articles, including an in-depth tribute to Jarvis by cult programmer Jeff Minter, and Stuart Campbell discussing Cruis'n USA's impact."
1. Missle Command (we need a new one) 2. Super Maris Bros (I get chased by big turtles, and my princess girlfriend gets kidnapped by a dragon every once in awhile) 3. Pac-Man, the race for survival ... I can only survive by collecting dots, and have four silly named ghosts trying to kill me.
Defender/Robotron/Stargate - how did you get those games to FEEL so right? Incredibly challenging, but not unplayable?
- It's a process of successive refinement - like cooking a soup. You put a little pepper in, maybe add some salt, decide that's too much salt... The difference is, with programming, it's easy to pluck out an ingredient that doesn't work and try something else. Defender was my first videogame, and, like any crazy kid who wants to design a game, I started out with unbelievable ambition. I wanted it to be everything - the player can fly, he can drive, he can go underground... After a while, I thought: 'I'm never gonna finish this. It's too much'. You have to stop and ask yourself: 'What is really the meat of this thing?'
Was it almost a good thing that you were limited by the technology?
- Designing videogames is all ABOUT limitation. It's not about doing everything that's possible, just because you can. It's about finding some small subset of something that's FUN and building on that. With fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter 2, you can go back and forth on this barely two-dimensional line, but you have all this richness of being able to execute a big variety of moves within that simple framework. The backbone of the game is simple - it's a small world, but the trick is how you work it to make it a rich and exciting world. You should be doing a few things very well, rather than a lot of things poorly.
At a time when videogames were quite static and samey, was Defender a bit of a reaction to that - something more brash and dynamic?
- Oh, yeah. You have to think - what am I doing that's cool that no-one else has done before? Otherwise, what's the point? With Defender, I knew that I wanted to do a game where you fly around. My only option at the time was 2D, so I thought, okay - you fly around in 2D, but, because the screen is so small, you're gonna be bouncing off the walls and that isn't much fun. So I thought of the screen as just one window on this expansive universe, and, the scrolling came from wanting to get a sense of speed and motion. All the best videogames are about survival - it's our strongest instinct, stronger than food, sex, lust for money... You have to create a survival story - to tap into the raw energy and adrenaline and get people naturally excited. Sounds obvious, but that's why you need a LOT of very nasty bad guys trying to kill you.
Noisily.
- Yeah! And in a really cool-looking way, too. People love special effects. They love to see things blow up, they love shiny, cool, sparkling stuff. At the time of Defender, we had a gifted nineteen-year-old programmer called Sam Dicker, and he was the particle effects genius - although at the time we didn't know what the hell they were. We just wanted to blow stuff up in an attractive way - and I wanted everything to respond accordingly to how fast you're flying, what you hit, how you hit it... Whenever I played Asteroids, I was always disappointed that, when you crash into a boulder, your ship just does this little rotate-and-collapse thing. That isn't very exciting. I wanted those moments to feel more interactive - like, if you get hit by a bigger rock, something bigger and more spectacular happens than if you're hit by a small one.
Your games are good at creating a sense of relentless hostility and danger - urging the player to go into battle against seemingly impossible odds. That's particularly true of Robotron...
- Well, with Defender, you can fly around and, to some extent, find a little safety. But with Robotron, you're stuck in this confined little space. That confinement is the key element in what makes Robotron feel the way it does. The constant feeling of being cornered and having to fight your way out of that corner - fight or flight. There's no choice. You're ALWAYS making a last stand. A lot of people tell me that Robotron is the only game that makes them physically sweat. It's the same for me, too.
How long did it take you to be happy with Robotron?
- It was
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
A lot of designers seem to believe that, when you try to turn right in a driving game, you shouldn't actually turn right, you should go into a skid and blow up and flip over, otherwise it's not 'realistic'. I believe that if the player tries to turn right, then you should let 'em - rather than messing around trying to make the game some ridiculous simulation that's not very much fun.
Amen. There are too many games out there that try too hard to be simulations, and end up sacrificing 'fun' for 'realistic'. If you want to make a sim, make a sim; if you want to make a game, make a game.
Now, this isn't to say that reality isn't important; the more realistic a game seems, the more fun it'll be. The trick is bridging the gap between what seems real and what would actually be realistic behavior. The Cruis'n series does a good job of this: any truly critical examination of the game's physics reveals it to be utterly unrealistic, and yet part of what makes the game so fun is that when you're playing the game, the controls feel and seem real.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Sure, the idea of it being exclusively about the survival instinct had its appeal in an arcade game. But I think there's more to it than that: in The Sims, for example, the only way you can be in mortal danger is by your own (possibly intentional) negligence.
The other aspect, which started with MUDs and continues now with MMORPGs and related genres, is immersing yourself in another virtual world. This is a different instinct, the instinct to explore and discover if you want to call it that. In [insert MMORPG here], you enter a virtual world with different rules than your own, and part of the fun is exploring that world and its rules. And yes, you do get in fights with packs of vicious cave trolls who can beat you to a pulp in 3 seconds flat, and that's another aspect of it, but to say that it's all about survival (or indeed that it ever was) is only half the story.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
I can see where they're coming from. It's more financially sound to make something that's been shown to work, especially in an industry that's hemorrhaging money as badly as arcades are. But man, how boring!
Robotron is cool, but I think that Llamatron is even cooler. It had humour and a gameplay that was very similar to RoboTron anyways. Thumbs up. :)
;)
Anyways, PDRoms.de is having a Llamatron-style competition(rules ), so take a look if you loved the game. The entries will be up very soon after the deadline, if I know the webmaster well enough
And for the ultimate survival game? Max Payne 2
Defender
This is my nomination for the best video game title of all time. Eugene knows how name his games, too.
I realized, as I was reading this article, that his defintion of fun is sort of against the RPG elements. I really love Gran Turismo (the best car RPG ever), and it's precisely for the reasons he didn't like about them : i.e. the realism and the challenge of driving things properly. I mean, hey, one can only drive so much in multiplayer Crusin' ____ before you find yourself yell, "that's total bull@#$%!"
I do think that the fun and gameplay are obvously important to games and are somewhat lacking in recent games... but if we have the processing power to make 'Gran Tursimo n' and give its cars the most accurate physics models and graphical detail while driving around real life courses without actually having to pay the huge amounts of money that real touring racing would take, then I'm all for it.
If you want to fun, twitchy, yet completely unrealistic racer, why don't you just make the car invulerable to wall hits, and increase your speed. Hell, just play Fzero or all those Tube-Racer-type futuristc car genre games.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Eugene, if you read this - I've lost your email address over the years and several moves, and if you are interested in getting in touch, I would love it if you dropped me a line at dudeATcircularreasoningDOTcom
:-)
:-)
It is so cool to finally see a Jarvis story on Slashdot. Eugene Jarvis is arguably the greatest video game designer of all time, and he's also a really cool guy. I've met him on a couple of occasions - it all started when I was doing my CS undergrad degree. We had to do a cheezy html assignment on a "great figure in computer science" - they were looking for a Turing or a Von Neumann. Some folks did it on Gates. I did mine on Jarvis, because he was the reason I got into computer science. I wanted to make games... In any event, this was back in the day when you could actually email people you didn't know and get a response. I found Jarvis' email on the net, told him about the page I was making and asked him if he had any stuff I could put on it. He sent me a big envelope full of magazine articles, screenshots and floppy disks. Way cool, and it led to a 19/20 on the assignment.
I decided to leave the page up on the web, with a guestbook where people could talk about Jarvis games, and it achieved a very modest noteriety among geeks. A few years passed and it became hard to get people's email addresses. The producers of the TV show NewsRadio decided they wanted to feature Stargate in one of their episodes and wanted to have Eugene play a cameo. They couldn't figure out how to get a hold of him and asked me. I passed them on to him, and he was on the show. (He was one of the moving guys taking the Stargate machine out of the office, hiding his face the whole time).
So, knowing that I wanted to get into the business, and I was a starving student, and I guess feeling a little grateful -- he flew me to a big video game show in Vegas. I got to walk around with a badge that said I was from Midway Games, which started to make me believe that I actually could do it. As an aside, I got severe food poisoning and spent 8 hours in a Vegas hospital - I'm sure glad he paid for my travel health insurance too! (Don't eat at the buffets in Las Vegas...).
A few years later I was driving through Chicago at the end of a big road trip and called him up and he invited us over to his place. His basement is one of the best arcades I've been in. Later we went out for dinner to a Thai place, and Larry DeMar just happen'd to be there (the other half of Vid Kidz) so I got to meet him too. I made a big show of paying for dinner (in thanks for the Vegas trip), whipped out my Mastercard and bzzt - Declined! Tough to describe how that felt... I had a friend of mine pay for dinner and then paid him back, so technically, I bought Eugene Jarvis dinner once.
Anyway, a couple of years later I have my Master's degree in CS and I actually make games for a living! I'm a graphics programmer with BioWare - and I really have Eugene to thank for it. I never really believed it was possible until he let me peek into his world.
Thanks Eugene, I'm living the dream...
Define "best" in this situation.
They're one of the finer cranky-gamer sites out there as of late.
Robotron forever! Oh, and Yak's new game looks amazing.
go run around Sainsbury's car park with a shopping trolley on a wet day.
wtf kind of english is that!?!
sometimes i hate that my name is on this one, other times i just think its funny
m l
http://gameboy.ign.com/articles/377/377848p1.ht