Eugene Jarvis, Arcade King, to get Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC

22 February 2005 0:16 GMT / By Kenneth Henry

The name Eugene Jarvis may not be as big as say, Miyamoto from Japan or Will Wright with his Sims. In the early 1980s though, as the coin-operated Arcade explosion had taken off with Space Invaders and Donkey Kong from The East, in America Jarvis developed: Defender. The First game with horizontal scrolling. As if this wasn't enough, he carried on to develop Robotron 2084 in 1987, which would receive the 3D PC treatment 13 years later and introduce the double-joystick arcade control panel.

Robotron was then resurrected in the all-colour, early 90s game Smash TV which arrived on 16-Bit consoles and then once again struck it big in the US with the Crusin' Racing Series. These early pioneering efforts have been enough to earn Jarvis the Lifetime achievement award at the forthcoming Game Developers' Conference, though that's not to say he's out of the game by a long shot.

Defender received yet another remake for the PS2 most recently, search the games section of Amazon to check out the details - and see if there's a respectful 2D version to go with it.