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Jarvis On Robotron, Defender, Acolytes

Posted by simoniker on from the is-it-2084-already? dept.

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."

2 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. In case of slashdotting, here's the text by scumbucket · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

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  2. About tron... by Lord+Graga · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 ;)