Despite the game’s success, digitised graphics enjoyed only a few years of popularity before being superseded by polygons. After completing his next game, Smash TV (a prescient classic in which people slaughter each other in the hope of winning toasters), Jarvis left Williams, which had become Midway following an acquisition. “The company was screwed up, like their worst competitor had staffed the upper management. The guys they hired could not have done a better job of destroying everything. A guy with no knowledge about videogames says: ‘What’s wrong with this company is we need more schedules and managers’.”



A rarity among top-tier designers, Jarvis is still working in arcade games today – his company Raw Thrills makes the Big Buck Hunter series and The Fast And The Furious games. “It’s going pretty well, but arcades today is a niche business,” admits Jarvis. “You have to find your place in the world. I think I have a feel for the arcade scene and a game that’s more of an instant gratification thing, where you don’t spend five hours earning the steering wheel of your car. There’s something beautiful about arcades. You can’t just be the third guy doing GTA, you have to find a spot where you can do something cool yourself.”

That’s something Jarvis shouldunderstand, because for a large portion of the industry’s history he was on a spectacular hot streak. When asked why he managed to be in sync with his audience for so long, he answers immediately: “I was the average player. If you’re a great player, it’s much harder to be a great designer, because you can’t relate to the average person. I was my own audience, so what I thought was cool, everybody else thought was cool.” Jarvis sighs. “It’s like when you listen to that song and think: ‘That’s what I’m thinking!’ Back then I was in the audience and on the stage at the same time.”