Michael Becker interview

By Scott Stilphen
(2017)

To put it simply, Michael Becker was to Imagic what George Opperman was to Atari.  He’s responsible for so much of Imagic’s "image", with everything from game graphics to packaging artwork to advertising.  At CGE2004, Mr. Becker was kind enough to allow me to archive his collection of slides that were made, covering the work he did during his time at Imagic, as well as several paintings that were done right before he started working there - much of which you'll see here.

Q: What is your educational background?

Michael Becker: I went to college at California Lutheran College (1967) and UCLA, but never did get around to graduating.  I was on a track in pre-law (international relations) and was very active on the debate teams of both schools after a pretty successful debate and public speaking run during my high school years.  At some point I found black-light paints and Zap Comics more inspirational and could never go back.

Q: What artists motivated you to pursue a career in art?

Michael Becker: Ron Cobb (LA Free Press, current feature film concept artist), R. Crumb, and Vaughn Bodē.

Q: Did you work for anyone prior to Imagic (after school)?

Michael Becker: I had a bunch of jobs before Imagic, including Art Director for the Berkeley Barb, comic books for the underground press, environmental artwork for Greenpeace and others (first Baby Seal T-shirt, baby!), and a lot of cruddy typesetting, paste-up and freelance artwork jobs that were always as much hassle as money.  I did a lot of freelance artwork years before and wanted to learn all kind of styles by doing a piece in the Frazetta, Leindecker, and other styles.

These paintings represent the last time I actually did artwork, right before I took the Imagic job in 1982:

(LEFT) Dulac homage watercolor painting; (CENTER) Frazetta homage oil painting; (RIGHT) J.C. Leindecker homage acrylic painting

Original watercolor paintings

Original Sentry commercial art acrylic paintings.

Q: How did you come to work for Imagic?  Was that the only game company you worked for

Michael Becker: It was January of 1982 and I had just read a Time magazine article (Ed.: January 18, 1982 issue) about how coin-op video games were a whole new industry.  I was working in an advertising agency at the time and the constant bang-bang-bang of the printing presses was driving me crazy.  I resolved to do something else in the New Year, and answered a tiny ad in the newspaper.

It turns out I was one of 350 applicants for the job of Art Director in a ‘video game company’, whatever that was.  I did an interview on the phone and kept trying to get out of driving 55 minutes to the actual interview.  They finally got a Vice President (Jim Goldberg) on the phone and he talked me into coming in.  It was actually because I had a couple board games in my portfolio that caused the most interest.

(LEFT) Sword Lords box art; (RIGHT) Original oil painting

Q: Do you remember what board games they were?

Michael Becker: I did all the artwork, typesetting, game design, writing and spot illustrating (even some of the printing!) for the board game Sword Lords for Archive Miniatures - an old D&D style miniatures company - and I’d done that work for fun.  I don’t think I got any pay, except for some left-over figures.  The artwork (above) was done in a frenzied two days.  The 2^nd picture is the original oil painting.

I also typeset, did cover work and production layout and spot illustrations for their other board game, Star Rovers.  Maybe some copies still exist in one of the game stores in the bargain bin, but I don’t have any slides (I have one copy of Sword Lords, but gave my only copy of Star Voyager to the publisher when he needed it in Vegas, either to sell to leverage into publishing again.  I don’t know what happened after that.).  These games were done about 1980, before I applied at Imagic.  I think they sold a couple thousand copies each.  I also did a dart game for the same company, Nuke-A-Tola, that had you pitching darts (nukes) at Iran.  Shivver my timbers, that might come back someday to haunt me!

Q: I was able to find some info on Sword Lords but nothing on Star Rovers (or was it called Star Voyager?) or Nuke-A-Tola (what a great name!).  I didn't realize that you worked with Wilfredo Aguilar on that!  It's amazing that you both have worked together all this time, at 3 different companies.  Was that planned, or did things just happen to fall that way?

Michael Becker: We were friends at a company (Gum Street) before I started in the industry and we “war-gamed” evenings and weekends.  He joined Imagic a few months after I came on board.  I wanted to work with him so he was my first hire there.

Q: At Imagic, you had the titles Art Director and Creative Director.  What exactly were your responsibilities there, and what tools/programs were available for you to use?

Michael Becker: I was hired to be the Art Director but during the interview Jim asked if I could help the programmers with their artwork for the games, since what they did was considered cruddy.  Without much thought I said, “Sure, how hard can it be?”  And actually, back then it wasn’t that hard – mainly because Bob Smith and Rob Fulop had programmed some great art tools for the Atari 800.  I used a joystick to ‘paint’ animation frames and another program to sketch in Atari playfield ideas, but had to use graph paper at first to design Mattel screens like the Demon Attack playfields.

It was an amazing time, with Imagic growing as fast as they could spend money.  I had a staff of about a dozen artists and a great print Art Director who I managed in putting together the boxes, books and collateral material.  After a few months, they asked if I wanted to learn Assembly Language and program games, too, but I was smart enough to say 'no' and become one of the first Creative Directors in the industry instead.

In that capacity I would work with Willy Aguilar (a great game Art Director who now works at EA) and a couple other game artists to make all the graphics for games.  I usually took an Atari 800 home and could bang out all the backgrounds and animations in about one weekend.

During the work days I’d jump back-and-forth between working with the programmers (where the action was!) and checking in with the Art Department under Marketing (where the confusion was!).  It was about the only way of knowing what games were actually on track for CES.

(LEFT) Earliest piece of Imagic logo art ever produced by a contractor. It hung in the lobby.
(RIGHT) A slightly later version of the same, done optically.  It was used for a 1984 catalog.

Q: How many titles (or game-related products) have you been involved with?  And for what systems (I realize this may cover quite a few)?

Michael Becker: Gosh, including all the foreign language and various platform versions, I once came up with about 125 titles!  Let me see if I can recall some of them:

ATARI VCS/2600

Atlantis
Cosmic Ark
Demon Attack (my first sprite!)
Dragonfire
“Fantasy Football” (unpublished)
Fathom
Moonsweeper
No Escape!
Riddle of the Sphinx
Shootin’ Gallery
Sky Patrol (unpublished)
Solar Storm
Star Wars: The Arcade Game
“Tank” (unpublished)

I can’t recall any work I did on Star Voyager, Trick Shot, Cubicolor, or Fire Fighter, but I might have done a sprite or two on the last one.

“Dungeon” (unpublished)
Injured Engine (announced but never released LINK)
Laser Gates
Quick Step
Rat Patrol (unpublished)
Wing War (cover mostly)

Atlantis
Beauty and the Beast
Beezer (? – unpublished)
Demon Attack
Dracula
Ice Trek
Microsurgeon
Nova Blast
Safecracker
Swords and Serpents
Tropical Trouble
Truckin’
White Water

ODYSSEY (with these you had to use a CHARACTER SET for graphics!)

Crime and Punishment
Demon Attack
Grand Slam Baseball (mostly Willy’s work)
I, Damiano: The Wizard of Partestrada (unpublished)
The Lonesome Gods (Louis L'amour with Bantam – unpublished)
Microsurgeon
Sherlock Holmes in "Another Bow"
Sherlock Holmes in Under the Boardwalk (unpublished)
The Time Machine (unpublished)
Touchdown Football

Imagic was the first 3rd-party PCjr games developer.

TI 99/4a (7 were announced, but I only recall these)

Star Wars: The Arcade Game (vector graphics done as tiles!  Crazy!)

Star Wars: The Arcade Game mock-ups.

Q: Do you recall any products that you worked on that ultimately weren't released?

Michael Becker: There were probably as many that weren’t made as were finally released.  We had a fantasy football game for the Atari VCS/2600:

…an Atari VCS/2600 tank game:

...a cool PCjr tank game that I thought showed promise:

…a PCjr game based on H.G. Wells book, The Time Machine that looked cool, whole Living Literature PCjr game designed with Louis L'amour's biggest novel, The Lonesome Gods, and many more!  In fact, one summer all of Imagic went to a brainstorm session and I took notes and made up screens of all the ideas that surfaces.  It turns out that of that list of almost 100 game ideas, virtually every one has since been made at least once.

Q: Did your work mainly involve in-game graphics, or were you also involved with packaging or other items aside from video games?

Michael Becker: I did both all the time for the frenzied few years that Imagic existed.  I worked with Mark Klein and whipped up the first graphics that we used crude digitizers to get in at title screens (Touchdown Football and other later PC games), did all the work on about a half-dozen games when a batch was coming through, and then designed up the fantasy photographic images for the covers.  I’d also check in with the package art and print materials, but the other Art Director, Wendy Zeto, did such a great job that I rarely had to do much more than approve her work!

Digitizing test shot using plastic Star Trek models

Q: How were screenshots made back then, since they obviously weren’t actual screen photos?

Michael Becker: They were made from cut-out pieces of stick-colored paper!  This was back before we could photograph screens.

Q: There's so many great photos in your collection that I archived such as these.  I'll try to include as many as possible in this interview.  Let's take them one platform at a time:

Screenshots (LEFT) and final artwork (RIGHT) for most of the Atari VCS/2600 games

Early box variations for Escape From Argos (AKA No Escape!), Demon Attack, and Shootin' Gallery

Q: A lot of the early Imagic packaging artwork made extensive use of plastic models that were heavily customized - being comprised of several different models.  In the Star Voyager artwork, the bottom of the left ship appears to be the Star Wars Millenium Falcon, and the right ship appears to use parts from a Battlestar Galactica model.  Demon Attack used rubber dinosaur figures (by Imperial?), with wings from Micronaut (?) plane toys.  Subterranea uses parts of a Star Wars Tie Interceptor, B-Wing Fighter, and Imperial Shuttle models. Cosmic Ark appears to be an amalgamation of several models, although I don’t recognize any. 

Michael Becker: The package covers were fun.  Willy and I would buy a bunch of model kits, bash together some cool models (we were seriously inspired by George Lucas back then), and work with an outside optical house to layer in special effects.  We ended up with a 4x5 image that was pretty slick and was also a fun diversion from the low-rez artwork.  We’d also sometimes do an illustration of some type, so we were also able to work with some of Atari’s best painters and graphic designers.  Later we used actors and props.  With the cover for VCS Solar Storm, the helmet came from a Mountain View army surplus store:

Prop photo for Solar Storm.

All these model photos were bluescreen elements for composite shots on boxes:

Model photos for Star Voyager.

Model photo for Subterranea.

Unknown model photos.  It appears to mostly consist of Star Wars models -
a Star Destroyer for the top part, and a Snow Speeder or an X-Wing for the bottom

I don’t remember which, if either, made the cover.  I recall having an airbrusher in San Francisco add more water, so it might not be either of these versions (Ed.: The VCS box used different 'day' artwork but the manual and cartridge label used the 'night' artwork with less water effects).

Moonsweeper model set.

Moonsweeper ad.

Q: The model set used in the ad for Moonsweeper really looks fantastic.

Michael Becker: That was a model I built that was used by our agency.

Moonsweeper screenshots.

Q: Two of your Moonsweeper (artistic) screenshots are different from the rest of the VCS slides in that they don't look like the typical 'cut and paste' creations.  They appear to be close to actual screenshots and are similar to the actual VCS game, although there's enough differences to make me think it's either an early (prototype) version or enhanced with added graphics, or possibly for another system.  These could possibly be static screens created on the Atari 800 (see the Atari 800 game concept screenshots below; the "Rat Patrol" slide uses a similar trail of 'dots').

Michael Becker: I believe these are VHS screens.

Q: Rob Fulop mentioned that his Fathom game started with a picture you did of a dolphin jumping out of the water.  Was it common for a programmer to get an inspiration for a game design from an artist in that regard?  What was the creative process like?

Michael Becker: That was an example of a single animation inspiring Rob, but it was different with every game.  I remember on Dragonfire that Bob Smith was real interested in inventing a new joystick dynamic and came up with the concept of Jacks - using the joystick to ‘sweep up’ objects in the playfield.  He also liked The Hobbit, and we brainstormed back-and-forth a little and came up with the idea of grabbing treasure away from a dragon.

Willy had mentioned this idea of putting all (or most of) the sprites together to make 2 large characters for a fighting game, but this was laughed at by the executives.  I liked the idea of bigger sprites and so Bob and I worked out to make an animated dragon that stalked across the bottom of the screen.

Actually, it was a lot like it still is today.  You work with a few guys (or gals) who you click with and together you just pitch ideas back-and-forth, try a few things, and if the chemistry is good you will come up with something fun.  Sometimes you get something that works but isn’t fun, but that’s where the magic is, isn’t it?

Q: Why are some VCS cart labels text-only (no artwork)?

Michael Becker: These were compositions we made ourselves for trade shows like CES.  To actually print them, you had to print a solid square of white ink first, let it dry, then print four colors on it.  That was the only way to print on the chrome paper.  It was very expensive, but kids loved the look.  In Imagic’s first focus test of the Mylar boxes, a kid swiped one and wanted to take it home; that’s when they knew that was the ONE they wanted to use!

(LEFT) Sky Patrol Image Bank slide (LEFT) and prototype box (RIGHT).

Q: One of your slides is of a sunset.  I can't match this with any game that Imagic released.  Was this for an unreleased game?

Michael Becker: This was an Image Bank slide purchased to composite into the sky for the Sky Patrol balloon game - Brad Stewart's VCS game that never got published.  Obviously the box didn’t get finished, either!

Q: Brad Stewart offered his (unfinished) Sky Patrol game to the CGE show in 1999 to make available.  He also had a box and labeled cart that I was able to get scans of (you can see them in my article).  I’m guessing these were created for promotional use.