His first game was chess, which he played as a young child; he was one of the best players at Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose.

[3] Having an interest in natural language processing, Jarvis was hired by Hewlett-Packard to help create a COBOL compiler.

[3] 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.

After four months of tag-team programming between DeMar and Jarvis, they produced Vid Kidz's first game: Stargate (1981), an enhanced sequel to Defender that they sold to Williams.

[8] He then designed Blaster, a sort-of Robotron sequel set in 2085 — after the robots destroyed humanity — but with different, 3D gameplay.

[6] The video game crash of 1983 hit Williams hard, forcing them to cut back and revert to much of their pre-Defender business.

He continued making games, designing Narc (1989) and helping develop Smash TV (1990), which drew comparisons to Robotron.

The second game from his studio, The Fast and the Furious debuted that fall along with the Target: Terror update kit.

In 2006, Raw Thrills purchased game developer Play Mechanix which is led by his friend George Petro.

[16] Together the two companies have developed arcade and video redemption games for ICE and Bandai Namco Amusements America.

He was recognized as the NY-AMOA Man of the Year in 2009[18] and he received the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Pioneer Award in 2013.