Look back to move forward: RESOGUN devs team up with legendary Defender creator

By Will Fulton February 13, 2015

jarvishousemarquecollaboration resogun defender — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Eugene Jarvis, legendary creator of arcade classics like Defender and Robotron, has teamed up with Housemarque, the Finnish developer behind Resogun, to create a new game. This is Jarvis’ first collaboration since developing Cruis’n USA with Midway Games in 1994. The collaboration was announced during a recent panel in Helsinki about the state of arcade gaming. The full video of that discussion will go up on Housemarque’s YouTube channel soon, but you can watch the excerpted announcement below. There is no word yet on when the game will be released, for what platforms, or what it might look like.

“When I saw Resogun I couldn’t believe how these Housemarque guys took Defender to a new level,” explained Jarvis about the surprising collaboration. “I wondered… what would happen if we teamed up? Mash up old school arcade with mad voxel tech and crazed nouveau Helsinki gamers… All I know now is that it is going to be explosive.”

With a background in computer science, Jarvis pivoted from designing pinball machines into helping kick off the golden age of arcade gaming with Defender in 1980, a side-scrolling shooter in which the player flies across a planet surface. He continued to be a force in arcades by working on classics like Robotron and Smash TV, and eventually founded his own studio, Raw Thrills Inc., which develops popular contemporary arcade games like Big Buck Hunter, among others.

Housemarque is one of Finland’s oldest game developers, founded in 1995 by two developers who cut their teeth on the Amiga. Teaming up with Jarvis is a natural move for a studio that started by developing the Super Stardust space shooters. The studio is best known recently for Resogun, a side-scrolling shoot ’em up PlayStation 4 launch title that draws major inspiration from Jarvis’s classic Defender.

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Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

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