DePaul University in Chicago has announced a gift of more than $30 million from video game designer Eugene P. Jarvis and his wife, university trustee Sasha L. Gerritson, to help fund construction of a student center.

Citing the wishes of the donor, the university would not reveal the amount of the gift, but it is larger than the $30 million that alumnus Richard Driehaus gave in 2012, the Chicago Tribune reports. The gift will establish the Jarvis Student Center for Innovation and Collaboration at the College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM)—which will be renamed in Jarvis’s honor—and fund an endowed scholarship at CDM and a research collaboration with the university’s Ruff Institute of Global Homelessness.

Starting in the 1970s at Atari and Williams, Jarvis programmed some of the earliest microprocessor-powered pinball and video arcade games. His best-known creations include Defender, Robotron: 2084, Smash TV, and Cruis’n. Jarvis and Gerritson are longtime supporters of the university, having previously funded the Sasha and Eugene Jarvis Opera Hall, the Opera Theatre Endowment, the Fund for Global Homelessness, and the Holtschneider Chair in Vincentian Studies.

“It’s been thrilling to help grow DePaul’s pioneering video game design program for the last 15 years and see it expand and flourish into one of the world’s foremost game design programs,” said Jarvis, who, in 2008, was named CDM’s first game designer in residence. “CDM is laser focused on the emerging creative industries and technologies of tomorrow, to give students the edge they need to innovate and thrive as future creators and professionals.”

“Making higher education accessible to the next generation—a core objective of DePaul’s Vincentian mission—has never been more important to us,” said Gerritson. “We want to enable DePaul students to dream big and to put their creativity and skills to use in a way that benefits society.”

(Photo credit: DePaul University/Tom Vangel)