I was originally going to become a biochemist, but it just got way too complicated.

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.