collision detection: The best video-game designer in the world

March 22, 2004

The best video-game designer in the world

Over at Salon, there's a terrific interview with Eugene Jarvis. Jarvis is, I think, one of the best video-game designers ever, if not the best -- largely because of his creation of Robotron 2084 (pictured above), which had such a perfect balance of simple goals and difficult challenges that it is an object lesson in how to create good play. Interestingly, in this interview he complains about how game designers these days spend less time architecting play and more time just doing set design:

Sometimes I come to work and I feel like I'm an interior decorator, you know? It's like: "Man, that green looks like shit!" "Don't you know this year it's purple, man! Green is out!" You're worried about all these shadows and reflections and eye candy and you're right, sometimes it's more about that than the game. "Madden 2004" is a hell of a lot like "Madden 1004." I think partly it's a limitation of the human being. You make things too complicated and too wild and people just can't deal with it. As much as there's all this marketing bullshit about how real everything is and how great the A.I. [artificial intelligence] is and all this stuff, you know, the guys really aren't a hell of a lot smarter than the guys that were running around on "Defender," and for good reason. Because you don't want a guy that's so smart that he kills you. You want somebody stupid that you can destroy.

Posted by Clive Thompson at March 22, 2004 10:38 AM

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Comments

I bet Jarvis didn't have anything to do with the Robotron 3064 or some BS, that came out for the Nintendo 64.

I had been playing Original Robotron on emulators and then on the Gameboy. (My brother turned me onto Robotron. I think the sickest aspects of the game are the rate of fire and the absolute swamp of bad guys locking on to you)

On a fluke, BlockBuster or some video store had the new Robotron for sale for $10. I bought it and played it once. I got to level 99 on my first credit and never played it again. 'Twas lame.

Posted by: Alfred O. Cloutier at March 22, 2004 5:15 PM

Heh. I'm actually such a hard-core Robotron fan that I rented and played that game. It indeed was pretty sucky.

Then in December, Midway released its collection of "Midway Arcade Treasures" with Robotron in it. I must have played it for about like 400 hours.

Posted by: Clive at March 22, 2004 5:44 PM

If you dig Robotron, the best modern re-imagining of it by far is Mutant Storm by UK indie game house PomPom. Best played with a console-style gamepad with analog sticks, as you have full radial move and aim control instead of the 8 degrees of the original Robotron. Great little piece of design.

I'm very curious as to what a Jarvis game circa 2004 will be like. The last thing I know of that he did was the Cruisin' series of 3D arcade racers, which was cool but not the landmark achievement that Robotron et al was. Seems like a lot of the old first-gen game designers have a hard time replicating their success in more modern eras... and to be frank, a game about fighting terrorists isn't terribly encouraging.

Posted by: JP at March 23, 2004 8:36 AM

Hey, I think I'd heard about this before. This looks great! I'm going to try it out today.

Great web site, BTW, JP!

Posted by: Clive at March 23, 2004 10:16 AM

Jarvis might be one of the best video game designers ever, but he's definitely not the best. If that were the case he would probably be around continually pumping out hit after hit. I would probably bestow that honor upon Shigeru Miyamoto, who has been making classic games ever since stepphing through the doors of Nintendo. No one can really hold a candle to him.

Posted by: Ron at March 24, 2004 11:02 AM

Google for Llamatron 2112.

Jeff Minter of Llamasoft here in the UK lovingly created it as an even better version of Robotron for the Atari ST in the eighties.

Just incredible - and I believe you can download a shareware version for PC or even Palm these days. I know there are mobile phone conversions somewhere online too...

Posted by: Tony at March 25, 2004 6:06 AM

And the best thing about Jeff Minter is that he is currently making a really interesting (so far) game for the Gamecube... on his own! You don't see that too often anymore (if ever), so make sure to support "Unity" when it is released!

Posted by: nowak at March 26, 2004 9:43 AM

Thank Bullfrog for putting up the money to publish Unity... it wouldn't exist otherwise. They're weighing in on the side of adding to the graphic workload, and the music licensing... Apparently there's a very hot name music act signed up, but it's all a bit top secret so far.

Posted by: Tony at March 26, 2004 10:09 AM

I hadn't heard about Unity before -- that sounds like an extremely cool project! I must check that out.

Posted by: Clive at March 26, 2004 11:45 PM

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