Skip to content
Pinball Profile
Pinball Profile
200 episodes tracked since 2020 about →
Copied!

Episode 400: Eugene Jarvis

PodcastAnalysis updated 2d ago50 min listen
From the creator

The co-founder and President of Raw Thrills shares his stories of getting into gaming, his time with Steve Ritchie, Atari, Williams, and now Raw Thrills and their development of Pulp Fiction pinball....

Listen on Pinball Profile

Highlights

  • Pinball Profile began November 1st, 2016 with an interview of Steve Ritchie at Stern Pinball
  • Eugene Jarvis and Jeff Teolis share the same birthday (January 27th)
  • Jarvis interviewed with Atari in fall 1976 but never received a callback, then was hired anyway shortly after
  • At Atari, the guy who hired Jarvis quit within a week, and his boss quit two weeks later, leaving Jarvis in charge of the department
  • Atari's early pinball innovations (rotary solenoids, electromagnetic sensors, relocated board) suffered from overheating score panels, flipper bearing failures, and sensor calibration problems
  • Steve Ritchie went to Williams in 1978 and created the game Flash with programmer Randy Pfeiffer
  • Firepower was conceptualized as an electronic-era multiball game inspired by electromechanical games like Fireball and Wizard from the early-to-mid 1970s
  • Early Atari programmers claimed it was impossible to flash a light in a pinball game, but Jarvis accomplished it in his first week
  • Defender was designed to create a feeling of flight and scrolling world, rather than the wraparound screen limitation of earlier games like Asteroids and Space Wars

Notable quotes

“Back then I was the young kid on the block, and now I'm the new dinosaur.”
Eugene Jarvis
“We're Silicon Valley. And they put the board, they put it at the bottom of the cabinet... And he was like, man, we're redefining everything, all this little crap from Chicago, it's garbage.”
Eugene Jarvis
“So basically we thought of ways to... some of the early games we had a lot of echoey sounds... And Steve actually had the idea to create a background sound... it would kind of rise in tension level as the ball went longer and longer.”
Eugene Jarvis
“It's not just points. And so we had this whole... We had to lock these three balls to create the multi-ball thing... it was kind of like doing this whole multimedia event.”
Eugene Jarvis
“There were some people inside of Williams that would call it a V-ball. So, like, you would get the multi-ball, and then they would just kind of, like, walk away and peace, you know, make a V-side.”
Eugene Jarvis
“When video games are taking off... Williams kind of wants to shift more into that field... but it wasn't we weren't thinking of video replacing pinball it was just a an expansion of the industry.”
Eugene Jarvis
“The programmer at that era become the designer too... I just what the hell I want to do... Steve was very hard on programmers.”
Eugene Jarvis
“Defender was like, okay, let's have... a world that was like, I think three and a half screens approximately, and you'd fly around this...”
Eugene Jarvis

Entities

  • Atari· company
  • Raw Thrills· company
  • Williams· company
  • Asteroids· game
  • Defender· game
  • F-14 Tomcat· game
  • Firepower· game
  • Flash· game
  • Space Invaders· game
  • Space War· game
  • Superman· game
  • Head to Head Pinball· organization
  • Pinball Profile· organization
  • Slam Tilt Podcast· organization
  • Dan Beeson· person
  • Eugene Jarvis· person
  • Ian Harrower· person
  • Jeff Teolis· person
  • Randy Pfeiffer· person
  • Steve Ritchie· person

More from Pinball Profile

→ All content from Pinball Profile
Pinball ProfilePodcast1w ago

Episode 439: Emily Reilhan

30 min listen

Talk about a banner year…and it’s only June! Emily has won everything under the sun so far in 2026 as you’ll hear, including the Women’s World Championship, the WNACS, the first ever Women’s...

Contact us about this coverage