I met Sam in the summer of 2018, during a fellowship visit to The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Soon after that, he was asked to join the Defender team. It was after this last job that Sam joined Williams as a pinball sound designer in 1979, having a childhood connection to Williams pinball designer Larry DeMar. He had significant technical skill, however, and took several jobs in the Chicago area, including at AT&T Technitron, a company producing resistance welding controls and a company that made uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units for banks and medical facilities. These hobbies guided Sam to studying the same topics at the University of Illinois, but he found the introductory courses dull and left after about one year. He was interested in math, science, and electronics from that young age, and he put a lot of effort into his hobbies: exploring a programmable calculator that his father brought home, tinkering with stereo components, and visualizing music on an oscilloscope gifted by a family friend. His family moved several times after that, owing to his father’s civil engineering work, and they ended up in Elmhurst, Illinois, when Sam reached the age of ten. Sam was born in New York City in 1957 and lived on City Island until he was about six years old.
(Photograph of original image taken by author courtesy of Sam Dicker) Eugene’s story is widely known Sam’s is not.Ĭover image from Play Meter magazine, December 1981. Notably, he was joined about six months into the game’s development by pinball sound wizard Sam Dicker, and it was this team of two that brought the game to the cusp of its release.
While Jarvis was the first and is perhaps the best-known designer of Defender, he was not the only member of the team. The game, Defender, was a side-scrolling alien-shooting thrill ride released in 1980 that would become an arcade phenomenon. In 1979, the company- now Williams Electronics Inc.-tasked one of their pinball designers, Eugene Jarvis, with producing a video arcade game of their own. The company experimented with contracting video game production to other firms several times during that decade, but the resulting arcade cabinets enjoyed limited success. In the 1970s, however, company executives witnessed the rise of a new medium-video games-and saw them as a new opportunity for growth.
Based in Chicago, Illinois, Williams Manufacturing Company started producing pinball games in the late 1940s their business flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, and the company’s colorful and innovative offerings became well respected and remained consistently profitable within the pin-game industry.
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