“We were jazz musicians in those days”, says Euge. “Just riffing on whatever cool new beat came along. Now, game design is all so carefully crafted and orchestrated. You’re not really saving the world any more. Your full-time job is to play your cymbal on the 3,084 th beat of this measure and you’d better be damn happy doing it. If not, there’s four guys waiting to take your place”.

Random Eugene "Defender/Robotron" Jarvis quote that sticks out from Way of the Rodent's excellent top-50 shooters of all time feature. Game heads should read it all, clearly. Mild game heads and word fans should skip to the top 10, as there's a genuine poetry in the higher placed entries.

Shooters have, oddly enough, always been the genre that provokes the most emotive games writing - there's a purity of response there which lends itself to easy eulogisation. Christ - I've got a piece of prose-poetry about Defender I lobbed at State Mag back in the day, which I'm tempted to relocate and post. A possible edit later.