Video: Eugene Jarvis delivers a postmortem of Robotron: 2084

Eugene Jarvis, the influential game designer best known for his work creating seminal arcade titles like Defender and Smash TV, delivered an upbeat classic game postmortem of his work on Robotron: 2084 at GDC 2014. Jarvis, who currently serves as president and cofounder of the Raw Thrills arcade game studio, spoke at length about the creation of the arcade classic and revealed some interesting insight into the play mechanics, hardware, software, enemy dynamics and sound synthesis of Robotron. Drawing from his experiences in the industry, Jarvis also explained how Robotron's revolutionary dual-joystick control scheme was conceived and why the classic top-down shooter's wave-based survival combat seems to remain so appealing more than thirty years after its 1982 release. Footage of his talk was recorded by the GDC team, and it's well worth watching for anyone with even a passing interest in classic game design. We've taken the liberty of embedding the free video of "Classic Game Postmortem: Robotron: 2084" above, but you can also watch it here on the GDC Vault.

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