There aren’t too many games whose designers have nearly had their heads torn off by a pit bull, but NARC was nearly one. “That was the one time I was scared shitless,” laughs Eugene Jarvis, reminiscing from the relative safety of his office at Raw Thrills in Skokie, Illinois. “Get two pit bulls in the studio and they’d start going nuts. The cage starts jumping around and they egg each other on. They’d wander over to the camera, and you’d look at their head and think: ‘That’s big. That thing could bite my arm off.’”

If Miyamoto is the Spielberg of videogames, then Eugene Jarvis is John Carpenter. In the days when most designers were lost in their mazes, early Jarvis productions Defender and Robotron: 2084 stood out as clever and unrelenting, with more room for satire than sentiment. In the late ’80s, he turned his attention away from science fiction and towards a vivid present of strip joints, drug dealers and vigilantes who stalked the mean streets dealing justice out of a bazooka. This kind of game would require a different treatment to the stylised neon graphics Jarvis tended to employ.

A groundbreaking project, it would use real actors, real pit bulls, and even hi-def screens. NARC marked the designer’s return to an industry he had left after the crash of 1983. “Everyone was burnt out in the mid ’80s,” he recalls. “Was the whole thing just another fad? Was it disco? You write a one-hit wonder but you don’t want to hang around the club when you’re pushing 40.”

Jarvis couldn’t stay away for long, however, and in 1986, after getting an MBA from Stanford, the promise of new graphical breakthroughs lured him back to the world of ROM boards and coin slots. “As games got better, the amount of animation increased,” he explains. “You needed armies of animators. And Japanese animators were just destroying us. I was wondering what other techniques we could use.” That’s when Jarvis discovered digitized video. “Here was this new technology that could revolutionise the industry. Rather than contrived cartoons, suddenly we could tap the emotion of real humans. I don’t need 3,000 people creating every pixel, just actors and a green screen, and then I can do loads of animation every day.”

Given the colourful treatment of NARC’s war on drugs, it’s surprising to learn that Jarvis’s thematic inspiration was surprisingly raw. “I had some close friends who went down the path of drug addiction. I saw the devastation. There was this frustration: how to combat drugs without eliminating everybody’s civil liberties?” In response, he created a violent fantasy, in which players could take on the roles of vigilantes Max Force and Hit Man, and clean up the streets single-handedly, eventually wiping out the kingpin, Mr Big.