Jeff Lee
Jeff Lee worked as an artist at Gottlieb just as the old pinball company was getting into the exciting new world of videogames. He tells us all about lasers, stooges and big noses
“Most of the programmers hadn’t done games before and it was reasonable that some efforts would come to naught”
Jeff Lee
As he’s often been dubbed ‘The Father Of Q*bert’, we wondered if Jeff Lee, the artist who first drew the big-nosed, wide-eyed bouncer, ever feels protective of the little guy?
“I don’t like it when they give him arms,” he replies, “like they did in the animated TV series. It’s against canon! Yeah, I do feel protective towards him but unfortunately, much like with my own children, he’s outside my sphere of influence.”
It’s a sensible attitude given that Q*bert is one of those iconic videogame characters of the Eighties that has never really left popular culture, still appearing not only in games but on T-shirts, as a cuddly toy and on the big screen in such movies as Pixels and Wreck-It Ralph.
The game’s legacy is a source of pride for Jeff, whose upbringing in the western suburbs of Chicago meant he was aware of the pioneering pinball company Gottlieb, a stalwart of the city since the 1920s. He was heading up the graphics department of a local community college when in 1982, he received a call from Richard Tracy, an old friend who worked at Gottlieb, saying they needed an artist to join their new videogames division.
“It was a job working with my friend making games,” smiles Jeff. “What could be sweeter than that? I was roughly the same age as the engineers and programmers, though I felt quite ignorant in terms of technical knowledge. But that didn’t matter because I was the artist. They pretty much deferred to me when it came to the graphics.
