I was honoured to be included as a guest in Neil’s Retro Tea Breaks Vol.1 book but to then be asked if I would be interested in creating Pixel Portraits of my fellow interviewees , well what could I say?
I liaised with Neil on what I thought would work for the portraits and we agreed on a simple ‘bust” style. What better way to test the idea than to create a proof of concept using Neil as the guinea pig!
This book was originally going to contain 12 Portraits but with stretch goals I ended up creating 16 including Neil;
- The Oliver Twins (British 8-bit pioneers)
- Al Lowe (Sierra, Video Game Developer)
- George ‘The Fat Man’ Sanger (Composer, Freelance/Lucas Arts)
- Bill Volk (Developer, Activision/Avalon Hill)
- Francois Lionet (Developer, STOS/AMOS)
- Rob Hubbard (Composer, C64 Maestro/Electronic Arts)
- Stoo Cambridge (Artist, Sensible Software)
- Jon St. John (Voice Over Artist, Duke Nukem 3D)
- Mike Dailly (DMA, Grand Theft Auto/Lemmings)
- David Fox (Developer, Lucas Arts)
- And – exclusive to the book – two new interviews with Chris Sawyer (Transport Tycoon, RollerCoaster Tycoon) and Ken Silverman (Build engine).
- Mark Ferrari
- Richard Garriott
But there was more to come…
I can’t recall how it came about but we ended up offering up 40 backer portraits for the premium tier which at the time was a gamble as I had no idea if anybody would be interested in having one. Well, to my surprise these sold out in a very short time and Neil asked me if I would be able to offer any more? Now I couldn’t commit to that many as I had to draw them before the deadline, so I worked it out that I could offer up another 20 slots. These also sold out too!
All in all I ended up drawing 76 Pixel Portraits for this project!
If you would like one yourself, drop me a line or head over to my shop page where various options are available including a special Soccer Team kit version which really looks the part!
