Eugene Jarvis truly is The Master. Smart, wicked sense of humor and one of the greatest laughs of all time! Such great memories of all that wonderful arcade Golden Age goodness. I owe Eugene a debt I can never repay, although Robotron does its damndest to collect still to this day! Much love and respect Sensei Jarvis!!

I remember finally scoring over a million on Defender. Happened after a 12 hour mid shift at the factory in 1985! I'd been playing the game for a long time by then.

Defender is the god of action shooters. Everything was, and most of it still is, unique on this machine: names of the enemies in an action shooter (similar to pac man enemy names) a scanner radar endless levels ultra fast gameplay wonderful firework style explosion when the player gets hit smart bomb that destroy everything on the screen many controller elements (more than the atari asteroids arcade machine) enemy ships are destroyed in their pieces instead of just a typical sprite blast animation. ultra cool sound effects..never heard before ..and even after rescue humans in the air, not only on the ground very unique enemy behaviour, never seen in any other video game up till now Nested enemy ships (swarmers inside of pods) extra ship AND bomb every 10000 hidden gimmicks ..for example, the right timing of the smart bomb at beginning of a level destroys the swarmers also Animated player ship unique character set attract mode Cool laser like player projectiles, also never seen before hall of fame, not just highscores ;) When I first saw the machine in action back in the days I was blown away by the optics, sounds and gameplay this machine has. This is the greatest arcade machine of all time. There is no clone up to this day that comes even remotely close to this machine.

Defender was/is an amazing classic arcade game. There was nothing else like it when it was released Feb. 1981. Stern's Scramble was close but Defender was on a whole 'nuther level in terms of complexity and gameplay. All games were designed to be challenging but Defender was designed to crush players and grind the remains into a fine talcum-like powder. Thanks guys, good stuff indeed!

The sound system on defender was also far superior, you could here it clearly four aisles away the sound was juicy and loud, symbolic poetry in animated form, a game changer in many ways.

there's a scene in the King Of Arcades documentary where Eugene Jarvis plays Robotron 2048 arcade. He does some trick where he lines up the enemies in a row and blasts them into star dust. It was incredible. Never seen that before!

What an absolute legend. His games were my childhood and I still play them (mostly Defender/Stargate) to this day. Any way I can get a transcript of this interview?

Cool to hear these stories. Oddly enough, Defender is one of my favorite games, especially on the Atari 2600 because of the difficulty settings and the brilliant way that you set the bombs off by ducking behind the horizon. I say oddly because I've terrible hand eye coordination when it comes to sports, but i got good at Atari. I figured out that it also kept enemy ships from shooting me, I was hooked. Especially when I figured out how to pop up from behind the horizon to snipe the lander ships. I just love it and still play it regularly. Eugene and all the folks at Williams made some of the best games. Succeeding in catching a humanoid after shooting the lander is so satisfying! Also like he says, it has a moral aspect to it where you are actually saving people on screen rather than just justifying shooting everything with a blurb about the mission in a manual or on the load screen. The sound effects are incredible. Sounds so powerful when you fire the engines up and shoot the laser. I'd played mainly games like asteroids and space invaders in which the ships just beep weakly, so Defenders ship was incredibly powerful. I love Robotron too. Took me months to figure out but then I loved it. Being able to shoot and move independently was unique at the time.

I love how he just talks on and on about not too much. Absolutely no disrespect to Mr Jarvis, I love it.

Well done, boys! I LOVE Eugene's stuff...almost all classic arcade gold!

Eugene Jarvis is awesome

Eugene Jarvis is my god.

Awesome!

they want to make original XBOX games run on PC too if Atari Box is real I hope its something like the NES Classic, If it is I hope its not just 2600 games and will include 7800 games too.

From an average game time of 20 seconds, to this: Williams Defender at 99/99 (max difficulty) and 5K per ship kzfaq.info/get/bejne/m9thdale1cDHhas.html

21:30

The Atari VCS is certainly niche, but is a nice platform for whatever you want. Unlike the Android powered Ouya, the VCS is a LinuxPC (with the option to install Windows). Their strategy includes making each console powerful enough and unrestricted to provide access to development tools (Unity or lots of OpenSource / Free options) - meaning every customer is a potential indie developer. As a Linux PC it's Steam-ready / capable and has enough horsepower with the Ryzen chipset to play contemporary titles. Or you can use it for streaming from PARSEC (which doesn't suck like Stadia), or as a media server, a Retroarch platform, or - whatever you want basically. Being open means access to all storefronts online vs one-only. It's basically an 'Un-Console' - a nice low-power / low profile LinuxPC which has been lacking since the collapse of Valve's Steam Machine. Plus the controllers aren't shabby using either featuring an Xbox clone, or a 2600 style joystick with a spin-able shaft for playing paddle games (on any system or computer since they're bluetooth). I've been wanting to go whole-hog with Linux on the desktop so this is a nice way to do just-that. Plus I left consoles for PCgaming over a decade ago - so this is the first 'console' that's interested me since 2008. More info can be found at : www.scribd.com/user/418760898/M

"Robotron 2048"??? Never played that