Eugene Jarvis knows it sounds bizarre.
“Come on, you’re going to get a bachelor’s degree in playing Pong?” he jokingly told a class of students at DePaul University recently. “You’re going to get a PhD in Tetris? Give me a break. Get a real job, dude.”
Actually, he has a real job. He’s president of Raw Thrills, a Skokie company that specializes in video games for the arcade crowd. And he recently signed up to be video game designer-in-residence at DePaul, where, yes, you can major in creating video games.
“Just in the last 5 or 10 years, institutions have realized this is a form of art,” he said. “So DePaul is one of the earlier ones on the bandwagon.”
At DePaul, he will help with student projects and hopes to launch a “mega-game” that video-game majors can develop over a number of years.
Jarvis, a boyish 53, traces his roots in the industry back to the late 1970s, when a nascent firm named Atari called him up. “It was like a playground,” he said of working there. He also worked at Williams and Midway before starting Raw Thrills with some Midway co-workers. He created the popular Defender game back in 1980, when you didn’t need a degree from DePaul or anywhere else to get in on the ground floor.
“You’d ask a guy, ‘Do you know how to program computers?’ And if he said yes, you’d hire him.”
Jarvis, who said his games have generated $1 billion through his career, said products like Nintendo’s Wii system have re-energized the field, which he said was stumbling because the games were getting too complicated; controllers featuring 20 buttons and three joysticks overwhelmed a lot of people. Raw Thrills has found a niche with driving games and shooting games such as The Fast and the Furious, Superbikes and Big Buck Hunter that are found in huge gaming facilities such as Dave and Buster’s as well as movie theaters and truck stops, which are new havens for arcade machines.
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Though special effects have changed since the early days, the basic gameplay of many titles remains the same: “What it all boils down to is you run around and … beat the crap out of each other. What does that do for society? Maybe it keeps it off the street.”