In video you are starting with nothing but a black screen. There's no game there. With pinball you at least start with that basic concept, but not with video. The challenge of going from no game to something today is only different because you have to create something so damn fun people will pay $1.00 every two minutes to play it.

Williams expanded greatly with the success of Defender but Jarvis left to found an independent game development firm called Vid Kidz with Larry DeMar in February 1981. The fictitious arcade game was called Stargate Defender after Jarvis' own creations and is described within the episode as being about "saving the humanoids" (much like in the game Defender). Jarvis's first encounter with computers came while he was in high school attending a one-day course on FORTRAN programming given by IBM.

He co-founded Vid Kidz in the early 1980s and currently leads his own development studio Raw Thrills Inc. Most notable amongst his works are the seminal arcade video games Defender and Robotron: 2084 in the early 1980s and the Cruis'n series of driving games for Midway Games in the 1990s. In 2008 Eugene Jarvis was named the first Game Designer in Residence by DePaul University's Game Development program.