THE INSIDE STORY ON ROBOTRON 2084

If it were possible to reach Zen nirvana through hand-eye coordination, then Robotron would be the ultimate instrument of enlightenment. A good Robotron player on a roll is a thing of beauty. Two joysticks against the world. No scrolling, no magic foe generator off screen -- all the adversaries are present and attacking from the word go. It's best to turn off your thinking brain and let instincts take over. You must succumb to a hyper-kinetic state of meditation if you want to defeat Robotron.

Robotron was the third game delivered to Williams by the creative team led by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar. It was a complete departure from their work on Defender and Defender II, save the science fiction storyline.

Jarvis had been in an auto accident and busted up his right hand. During the weeks of rehabilitation, he came up with the idea for the Robotron controls as two independent joysticks (something he could still operate with his broken hand). He drew on two previous video games for inspiration. The first called Chase for the Commodore Pet computer (something only "a real troglodyte" would remember, according to Jarvis) was a character mode game where you made pi signs walk into asterisks. Further inspiration came from Stern's Berzerk. Jarvis always liked Berzerk, but was frustrated that you could only shoot in the direction you were moving. Using one joystick to fire and one joystick to move solved that problem and offered players a new level of freedom (clip #1).

That wasn't the only inspiration that Stern provided. They were due to ship the sequel to Berzerk, called Frenzy, within a few months. The Robotron timeline was stepped up dramatically so Williams would have the next new robot game to hit the market. Once the basic concept was created, the bulk of the programming was completed in an amazing four days.

They just kept adding robots. If twenty robots were fun, why not sixty? If sixty were fun, why not 120? Soon they brought to life a seething mass of enemies. Thirteen years later, few games have equaled Robotron's body count per second.

The problem was that they needed a story behind all this mindless carnage. So they decided to throw in the nuclear family. Saving humans worked in Defender and it was becoming a theme. Family members became your buddies, giving the world of Robotron good guys and bad. A classic sci-fi scenario was starting to take shape.

Jarvis reasoned that if machines kept getting smarter, they would eventually realize humans were a liability (clip #2). Machines would also acquire rights and unplugging one would be an act of murder. Robots would come to the conclusion that the resources used to make more robots were being wasted on humans, thus humans should be terminated. Enter the player. His mission: destroy the robots and save the nuclear family.

Robotron was an instant hit. In addition to it being another fun and innovative game, Robotron was bolstered being the first game with 2D bit blitter hardware. Robotron continued improvements to Williams' standard electronic system, acknowledged to be the best in the industry and backed up by an excellent service department. It shipped a healthy 19,000 units and spun off a cabaret version with a 13" monitor and cocktail sit down model. Marquees reading simply "2084" were created, but when the final version of the game was released the title was officially "Robotron: 2084".

It was the second of three games Jarvis and DeMar developed independently for Williams. Their third project was called Blaster, a game with a short test run produced in odd cylindrical black plastic cabinets, just like the blue ones created for Bubbles. Blaster also had a home incarnation for Atari computers, but by the time it hit the shelves the Great Video Game Crash of '83 had begun to take its toll. Jarvis and DeMar, along with many others in Williams core brain trust, left for several years only to return later and help lead a resuscitation of the arcade industry in the late '80s. As a result, many games from the mid eighties like Blaster became lost in development or test runs (clip #3).

Like most games, Robotron has some cool bugs. In early versions of the game, Quarks were referred to as "Cubeoids" in the attract screen. During the tank wave, if the tanks fire twenty shots that don't hit anything the game thinks there are still twenty shots in the air and won't fire anymore, allowing you to pick them off at will. The brain wave has a great bug that can be used to rack up bonus points galore (clip #4). Perhaps the most interesting hidden feature is the screen credit easter egg, created in part to frustrate would-be game pirates (clip #5).

DeMar has since shifted back into pinball, where he is known as one of the world's foremost programmers. Jarvis went on to retool Robotron as Smash TV and to work on games like Narc and his current project Cruisin' USA, which have kept kids from ever leaving the arcade. Years later, Robotron still has a piece of Jarvis' brain (clip #6). Like Buddhism, once its becomes a part of your life it's hard to forget. Jarvis, a true gamer through and through, is not afraid to discuss his creations in the spiritual terms they deserve (clip #7).





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