We chat to Eugene Jarvis on his ruthless arcade classic Defender

It’s hard to imagine a time when every game – no matter how simple the concept – felt fresh and new. But it once existed. Take, for example, Defender, designed by gaming legend Eugene Jarvis. For the uninitiated (and if you’re one such person, are you sure you’re reading the right magazine?), Defender is a wraparound side-scrolling shooter, with a small cast of deviously designed enemies, and a defend-and-rescue theme. The aim is to stop Lander aliens making off with your small crop of humans, carelessly exposing themselves on the stark planet’s surface. When a Lander snags a human, it rises to the top of the screen, consumes it, becomes a crazed Mutant, and comes after you. Lose all your guys and the planet explodes, driving the point home that you’re rubbish and that Defender is one tough cookie.

In these enlightened times, we’ve seen hundreds of side-scrolling shooters, but when Defender appeared, it was so revolutionary, so different, and had such complex controls that many assumed it would flop. But eventual strong sales and many sequels and remakes (see Stuart Campbell’s The Definitive Defender in issue 29 for an overview) subsequently confirmed its legacy. However, it’s the original Defender that excites gamers most, with its mix of relentless, ruthless enemies, fine-tuned controls and on-a-knife-edge gameplay.

What its fans perhaps don’t realise is that Defender wasn’t as original as it seemed at the time, and it evolved from an early game mash-up. “I was strongly influenced by Space Invaders and Asteroids, and thought we’d put the two together and create an even greater game,” laughs designer Eugene Jarvis, amused by the naivety of his younger self. “But the practical realisation of that was a real pain in the ass…”

First, hardware considerations caused problems. “Back then, games were black and white, with plastic transparent overlays for colouring different screen elements,” he says. “So we thought, ‘What’s the future here?’ We decided four colours would be enough, but we wanted this system to be for the future, so we did 16. I mean, who would ever need more than that? Sixteen colours was way more than would ever be utilised in a game.”

Resolution was boosted from the industry norm of 256x256 to 320x256, because “screens are wider than they are tall, so this gave us a better aspect ratio and the potential for a better-looking game”. Also, due to the team “not really knowing anything about hardware”, the decision was made to utilise a system that moved objects in software rather than hardware – commonplace today, but rare at the time. “The computer had to write the pixels to the screen for every object, which was costly, meaning we couldn’t put much on the screen,” explains Eugene. This fact alone drove various design considerations for Defender.

We ask Eugene how Defender’s gameplay came to be, and he notes how games were so simple in that era that you could throw a concept up on the screen in a couple of weeks and play with it. He recalls various concepts were trialled, with the first basically being a Space Invaders rip-off. “You moved a little missile base, but instead of just shooting upwards, you had buttons to shoot diagonally! We thought this was going to be the greatest thing ever, but after a week or two we figured out that it wasn’t much fun [laughs].”

… continued