Jeff picks his three favourite projects
Jeff Lee
Q*BERT
“It evolved from an old graphic obsession of mine, a hardware exercise by Kan Yabumoto, a coding experiment by Warren Davis and ‘sound-bytes’ from David Thiel.”
CAVEMAN
“This is the project I cut my baby teeth on – a videogame but primarily a pinball table. Didn’t do well but a fond memory nonetheless.”
DOUBLE CHEESE
“Lots of sprites and
256 colours to spend on animation of lab rats in their knickers bouncing balls of cheese with their arses. I get paid to do this?”
If you’re interested, a prototype of Tylz is available on the internet, so you can make up your own mind. One game that did get a full release, however, was The Three Stooges, the subtitle of Brides is hinting at its fiancé-rescuing theme. Jeff had grown up watching the popular slapstick shenanigans of Larry, Curly and Moe and as he knew Columbia Pictures had made those seminal short films, he pitched a game based on their pie-throwing antics. “Sam Russo took it up as the programmer and I was really enthusiastic about doing the art,” grins Jeff. “Sam recalls throwing some sort of goo against walls and recording the sound for the pies splatting in the game. Stuff was being hurled and things were being hit. Our boss Ron Waxman raised some concerns…”
Sadly, it was more than goo that was about to hit the fan. Mylstar closed its doors in September 1984 and Jeff returned to freelancing as an artist, doing illustrations for various newspapers and graphics work for Macromind, which included producing art for popular Mac game Maze Wars+, released in 1986. He kept his hand in the arcade business, producing the visuals for Incredible Technologies’ overhead driving game Banzi Run which was complete but never fully released, then near the end of the decade, he once again teamed up with Warren Davis at Premier Electronics for the innovative Exterminator. The game features a giant disembodied hand which can crush, grab or shoot a host of insects and other pests which have invaded your home. It’s an unusual concept with a distinctive look created solely from digitised graphics, all housed in a striking custom cabinet.
“That was a great project to work on,” beams Jeff. “By this time, I was married with small children and consumer camcorders were relatively cheap. I could use the same one I was using to film my kids to capture images, as well as the sophisticated cameras we had at the office. We digitised all kinds of stuff for that game… roly poly bugs I filmed in a wash pan in my backyard, frogs jumping and I made models of stuff, like the wasps and the interior of the house, and filmed them. But the market was against us. It was maybe too weird and the controls were too difficult for players. It got some great reviews from some British publications – they said it would either make us a lot of money or we’d go broke!”
Jeff starts to laugh, confirming it was indeed the latter, though not before the company returned to creating pinball machines for several years, given their renaissance in the early Nineties. The new decade saw Jeff move into console games, working on Home Alone for the Mega Drive released in 1992 and then for the SNES, he brought his artistic talents to Q*bert 3, an interesting and slightly psychedelic take on the cube-hopping formula. “That was a rare incidence of someone tracking me down. I got a call from the guys who had the licence who knew I was the original artist. It was great going back to those characters, with better resolution and more colours. And of course, I made sure he had no arms.”
Though Jeff no longer works in the industry, his interest in videogames and the history of the medium remains undiminished. In 2018 he published Q*bert & We, chronicling his time at Gottlieb and featuring interviews with many of his old colleagues (see the ‘Q*bert & He’ box on the previous page), and he is a regular guest at retro shows across the USA. He also lives close to the wonderful Galloping Ghost arcade in Chicago which houses many of his classic coin-op titles, including Q*bert of course. We wonder if, when he sees his long-nosed creation in the arcade or on the movie screen, does he smile and think, ‘My boy did good…’?
“Something akin to that,” Jeff says, chuckling. “To some people, Q*bert means nothing, but for those that it does, I still get a, ‘Wow, did you do that?’”
Many thanks to Jeff, his goddaughter Nora Canfield, ‘Trickman’ Terry Minnich and arcade-museum.com for providing photos and sketches.