“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.
