He joined Atari in its black-and-white days and is still making videogames almost half a century later. Roger Hector shares stories of holograms, vector tanks and scratched Sonic soundtracks

Words by Paul Drury

Over your long career, you have worked at some of the biggest names in the industry, including Atari, Bally Sente, Electronic Arts, Disney, Sega and Namco Bandai. Which one were you happiest at?

Oh gosh, that is a tough one to answer because for me, it’s been multiple decades and every one of those companies had its own qualities, its own pluses and minuses. I did really enjoy Atari because when I first joined, no one really knew what Atari was. It was almost non-existent.

How did you find out about it, then?

I had a college friend, Peter Takaichi, who worked there. I had moved to the Midwest [of America] and really wasn’t enjoying it because the weather was terrible [laughs]. I wanted to come back to California! I grew up in San Jose, pretty close to this strange company Pete worked for called Atari. He said they had made Pong, which was the only videogame I’d ever heard of, and I should come and work for them.

Surely you don’t get a job at Atari just because you know someone who works there?

That was pretty much it [laughs]. It was 1976, the early days, and they couldn’t hire people with videogame experience, because no one had it, right? So they hired people with ‘related experience’. I had a degree in industrial design and learning to draw and render was part [of the course]. Pete ran the design department at Atari, where they designed the coin-op cabinets, because back then, every cabinet was different. I worked there for a year or so and then worked for a guy called George Opperman.

We know that name! He was responsible for much of the art of Atari, including the iconic Fuji logo.

That’s right. He was head of art and was very talented and very professional. His department had some great artists. I was trying to make my way through it, so if George came in and said, “We’re doing a Superman game,” I’d just say, “OK!”

Atari did do a Superman game but it was a pinball table not a videogame. Were you producing art for both departments?

Oh yeah and with a pinball machine, there’s a lot of art to do. You’d be given a blank playfield, with all the holes in, and you would have to create art for the playfield, the component pieces which would get mounted on it plus the back glass, which was a big production. That was what attracted people to the game.

You worked on Atari’s very first pinball table, The Atarians, which means you must have had Eugene Jarvis (designer of Defender and Robotron: 2084) as a colleague. Did you party much with Eugene?

[Laughs] I’d like to say yes but actually, no. I really enjoyed meeting and spending a certain amount of social time with everyone and they represented a broad spectrum of personality and skill types. I absorbed a lot from everyone and Eugene was very good.