People Go To the Games Arcade To Witness Blood-Soaked Atrocities

Pajitnov, Miyamoto and Bleszinski sound like the kind of people you want on retainer if you’re ever caught trying to smuggle a crateful of tranquilised Lithuanian orphans into Italy. In actual fact, they’re three of the world’s most famous game designers – or they would be, if there was such a thing as a famous game designer. Even if you don’t recognise the names, you’ll definitely know some of their work. Alexei Pajitnov is the mild-mannered, Beaujolais-loving maths genius behind Tetris; Cliff Bleszinski created Gears of War; while Shigeru Miyamoto is basically the Walt Disney of the console industry. He’s responsible for Mario, Zelda and most of the other Nintendo classics you can think of. (But not Kirby, right, because Kirby is fucking weird. Kirby eats his enemies and he looks like a pancreas with some cartoon eyes stuck on. Jesus.) What’s my point? Oh yes, my point is that, obscure or not, game designers are amazing. They’re worth talking about, arguing about and perhaps even following home from public speaking engagements and then watching, quietly, from the safety of a nearby tree. And who’s the best game designer of them all? I reckon it’s Eugene Jarvis: the Paul Verhoeven of the arcades. Since the early 1980s he’s been turning out brilliant pixellated mayhem that shatters nerves and empties wallets – and he’s always stayed true to his roots, too. Let’s check out a representative sample of his games, eh? Defender, Arcade, 1980

Jarvis got into design because of pinball, but in the early 1980s, pinball was dying off, and arcade games were taking over. That meant that he – and his friend Larry DeMar – ended up making Defender, a fast-paced action game that takes the basic Space Invaders template and turns it into something much, much less shit. Defender scrolls, for one thing, which is always money in the bank, and its disconcertingly complex control scheme allows you to blast your sleek grey craft back and forth over the surface of a planet, shooting lasers at aliens, firing off a smartbomb or two and even warping to hyperspace when things get nasty. You can also protect weird little colonists moving along the bottom of the screen in pink disco spacesuits – or you can accidentally drop them to their deaths instead. Decisions. Defender was hard for early arcade audiences to master, but it became a massive hit because it was so satisfying once you finally became good at it and the explosions were dead good. Famous fans include Martin Amis, who once wrote plaudits like: “It has the best colours, the best mythology, the best visuals, the best noises” about the game, and The Beastie Boys, who didn’t. They did sample it, though. I think. Robotron: 2084, Arcade, 1982

I’m pretty sure that Robotron: 2084 – another Jarvis/ DeMar team-up – is the greatest game ever made. It’s certainly one of the cruellest, brutally killing most new players off in under 30 seconds or so. After the convoluted controls of Defender at least there’s not too much to get your head around. It’s one of you against hordes of them: the left joystick moves you around, while the right allows you to shoot in eight different directions. Robotron’s famous for plenty of surprisingly forward-thinking stuff, like emergent AI as different enemy behaviours come together to create weird on-screen tactics, and the whole twin-stick shooter genre in general, which has given us everything; From Smash TV, in which you kill mutants to win toasters, to Geometry Wars, in which you kill rectangles to win the confused admiration of your peers. (Times change, I guess.) Robotron’s also the only game I can think of that was created because its designer had a car crash and needed a control set-up he could operate with his arm in a cast. See, even when Eugene Jarvis is hurting himself he’s still amazing. NARC, Arcade, 1988

NARC was, as far as I’m aware, the very first arcade game to use digitised graphics: a system that involved the developers filming actors – or rather “actors” – against a blue screen and then turning them into sprite-based animations in the finished game. That makes NARC a wonderful high-octane study of late 1980s fashion crimes, most of which now look distressingly like contemporary fashion crimes. NARC’s also a video game attempt to engage with the war on drugs – at least that’s the justification offered by Max Force and Hit Man, as they take to the streets of America and blow junkies to pieces with rocket launchers and assault rifles. Putting aside the fact that people with names like Max Force and Hit Man are probably more likely to be found taking drugs – to steady their nerves before a gruelling eight-hour shift making welder’s porn in a barn somewhere in the wilds of the Napa Valley – NARC holds up surprisingly well when played today. Its levels are exciting, its digitised costumes are hilarious, and the final boss fight sees you shooting the individual vertebrae out of a drug kingpin’s spine. This is how The Wire was originally meant to conclude, but HBO bottled it. Suckers. Target: Terror, Arcade, 2004

Unlike most game designers, Jarvis stayed with arcades long after the industry had started to fall to pieces. His company, Raw Thrills, is now responsable for modern classics like Big Buck Hunter, for example – a game in which, I’m sad to report, you do not track down and murder an inbred red-neck named "Big Buck", but massive deer. Jarvis also made Target: Terror, a shooting gallery game that does for 9/11 what NARC did for the 1980s drug scene: it buries the whole thing in arthritic digital actors and then allows you to blow everybody to pieces. Is Target: Terror a great game? Probably not. It’s certainly not close to matching the genuine mechanical brilliance of something like Robotron: 2084, for example. It is, however, an incredibly endearing game, and its digitised splatter is a fitting testament to a designer who has never forgotten that people go to the arcades to witness violent, blood-soaked atrocities, accompanied by the endless looping of lo-fidelity gunfire samples.

Previously by Christian Donlan:

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