['Playing Catch Up' was a weekly Gamastura column, in which I picked notable subjects in the game business and interviewed them about their career. This time - I had the chance to talk to the one and only Steve Englehart, writer of some of the best comics of the '70s.]
Today’s Playing Catch-Up, a weekly column that dares to speak to notable video game industry figures about their celebrated pasts and promising futures, speaks to Steve Englehart, co-designer of 8-bit Atari titles Final Legacy and E.T. Phone Home and writer of 2003 PC and Xbox title Tron 2.0.
Comic Beginnings
Englehart’s career began as a comic book writer. His first work was as an art assistant to Neal Adams on issue 10 of Vampirella in 1970, though he was soon drawn to working as a writer, and worked on popular and critically acclaimed runs of Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Avengers for Marvel, where he was known to fans as “Stainless” Steve.
A dispute with then editor-in-chief Gerry Conway over being forced to split Avengers 150 into two issues – and the fact that Conway added a number of pages of his own scripting to the latter – precipitated a move to rival publisher DC.
Over the course of the next year or so, he worked on Justice League of America and a celebrated eight issue run of Batman stories in Detective Comics before finally leaving the industry altogether, with, he says, the intention that he “wouldn’t be coming back”.
The Lure Of The Computer
His first novel, The Point Man, was printed by Dell Publishing in 1981, and Englehart was immediately asked to write a second, which he planned would focus on “the then-new and exotic place called the Silicon Valley”.
“That came to me because that was when I got into games, as a player,” he says. The area also happened to be just down the road Englehart’s home in Oakland, so Englehart called on a friend of his, Ted Richards, who had worked in underground comics like Dopin’ Dan while Englehart was at Marvel.
“Ted was working at Atari, and he was the only guy I knew in that field,” Englehart explains. “I asked him some questions about how the industry worked, and he said, ‘I don’t know the answer to any of that stuff, but come work for us’. I protested that I had a contract to write a novel. He said: ‘But we’ll give you a computer’.”
“So I returned my advance to Dell,” Englehart laughs, “in exchange for an Atari 800.”
The lure of the computer wasn’t the only factor, of course – Englehart explains that the possibility of a career in the industry proved too compelling and tantalizing an option to turn down. “I was fascinated by the computer and game industry, which was, again, just blowing up,” he comments. “I decided that there were lots of things I could do with my skills; that novels would still be there, etc.”
“The point, I guess, is that having an impressive background and unimpressive computer skills was the norm for those days,” he muses, “as we all helped shaped what the industry became. There were certainly people with great computer skills, but when the industry took off, the norm was more like me.”
Despite the change in industries, he comments that initially he felt “the only real difference was commuting to and from Milpitas every day and working in an office”.
“As a comics writer/novelist I had worked at home, by myself,” he says. “But a guy named Gary Fox also worked at Atari, in another division, and we shared the commute – he had an Alfa Romeo Spider convertible. And the guys in the office were a fun group. So the office life was different for me, though commonplace to most of the world.
