Interview: Brenda Cook

Oh, no, it's not a problem at all. I'll try and help you as much as I can. This is 35 years ago, right?

Were you even born then?

Which is the year that I think I got hired at Sega.

Oh, so where are you calling me from?

Oh yeah. I haven't been there in a long time. We used to go every year, you know, when I was working in video games, we'd go to the CES show. They don't have that anymore, do they? I think there's an electronics show…

Yeah, it was huge. We would go every year and we'd go with Sega and they'd put us all up at the Luxor, some dumb place. Nintendo would have this huge booth, and Sega and Sony. We had a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun working at that company.

Yes. I was working as a graphic designer. I was living in San Francisco, and I had an office down in Burlingame, and I had assorted clients. I was an illustrator and a graphic designer, and one of my clients, she was designing children's clothing, and I would do the artwork for the clothing. She goes, "You know, I have this friend that works at Sega, and they're looking for an artist. You should apply." I'm like, "What?" I [didn't] know Sega… and I did it. I said, "You know what? I'm just gonna go over there. They're not that far away." I brought my portfolio.

Nobody was working on computers back then. I did all cut-and-paste graphic design. I had an office that I shared with a printer and a marketing guy, and the three of us all gave each other work. I show up at this interview, and Mark Cerny is there, and I forget the name of his business guy. I think Mark had already had like… three people working in his R&D group [Sega Technical Institute] so far. It was just Alan Ackerman, it was… forgot his name, he's a programmer, Mike… and I can't remember who else. I go in there, I'm wearing a cute little black dress, and I sit down and I show him my stuff, and I'm thinking, "I'm completely wasting these guys' time, right?" I have a lot of different kind of artwork to show them. I get ready to leave and Mark goes, "How much do you want?" The guy next to him hits him and goes, "You're not supposed to say that." [laughs] I'm like, "Seriously?"

I thought about it. Y'know, I had been doing graphic design for a while and I thought this will be fun. I didn't know a thing about animation, but I was a good illustrator. I took the job. We worked on these machines called Digitizers, and I learned how to create artwork… 16 pixels… [this was] a long time ago, 8 pixels? It was me and Mark and Alan and Mike, I think that might have been it so far. Then he built up the company from there, until we got to be around 35 people.

It was kind of like doing puzzles. I'm really good with color. Once you sketched it out and you had a certain color palette you could work with, it actually wasn't that hard. I was learning everything I could about animation but… I mean I'm married to a real animator who works on tentpole movies as an animation director for huge films, so what I was doing is laughable, but it worked for the time we were in. To see characters blink or not blink…

None. Zero.

Nothing. [laughs] No, and I remember one time, I think four of us were sharing… it was me, Craig Stitt, Alan Ackerman, and somebody I can't remember. I had just created this little animation of Kid Chameleon and he was on a motorcycle and he rides along and the bike jumps up in the air and spins and then it comes down and I was so happy with it. Alan goes into the kitchen, which is right next door and microwaves some popcorn and shorts out everything. I lost my animation. I had worked on for four hours and I go to Mark and I'm like, "I'm going to lose my mind." He goes, "You should have saved it."

Oh my god. I'm like, "I can't kill Alan because he didn't do it on purpose." You know, but I learned how to save my work after that. Once you've done something… Good times!

Why not? Oh- [laughs] I shouldn't ask you guys.

No, he's a busy guy. Here's my opinion of Mark: I really really really love him. He's this special guy, you know. Young guy back then… he'd been married to a beautiful woman named Katsura. He spoke perfect Japanese. A super brilliant guy. I happen to get along with… I notice that a lot of my friends are way, way smarter than me. Their IQs are in the stratosphere. I think I'm comic relief for them. We got along great. We tease each other and you know, we had a great relationship. He ran the company really well, I thought. He put up with all of my shenanigans.

I remember one time when Christmas… you know how your family might get together and do something like a Secret Santa or you pick a gag gift out of a box or something. I got a fake arm that year. Oh my god, I couldn't have asked for a better gift than this. What I did was waited for Mark to leave and then we went into his office, and there's housekeepers who [eventually] come in. We knocked over his office chair and had the arm coming around the desk. [laughs] So funny, because we wanted them to find it, or him to come and find it in the morning, I forget. I don't know…

I can tell you, this one prank that we pulled on him, It was a masterpiece and I'm going to take full credit for it. One day he had to go off site. He was gone all day. I took advantage of that by hosting this little mini documentary about the company. They had a cameraman follow me and I had a fake microphone and I would go around and interview every single employee and [show] all this stuff they were getting into that they weren't supposed to be doing while he was gone.

I started in going like, [in a nature documentary voice] "Let's go in and check out Sega Technical Institute and find out what the employees are up to, shall we?" So we go in and Sue was the receptionist, and I'm like, "Excuse me, I'd like to-" and she wouldn't even talk to me cause she was too busy filing her nails and talking to her friends on the phone. Then I go back and I talked to the artists and they're all gambling, nobody's working. Somebody goes, "He's [Cerny] not here but I know how to get into his office!" and they're picking the lock. We go back and the programmers are… Biko, he was one of the programmers, and they had him tied up to a pillar and they were [mock] torturing him. The Japanese guys were all asleep with liquor bottles everywhere.

Rick Macaraeg was a designer and there would be him and Hoyt [Ng]. You could just see his feet over the divider and Hoyt pretending to stomp on him because he was trying to get some design information out of him or something. You could just see his legs jump up and down. Oh it was so funny. When he [Cerny] got back we played it for him. It was so funny, oh my god. I would love to find that because it had to be some kind of VHS tape or something, I don't know. You're making me cry. [laughs] Yeah we got a lot of work done.

It was so fun, it was so fun. You know what he did once? He took us all on a party bus to Napa for the day. It was so much fun. One day he took us sailing along the bay, that was a lot of fun. He took me to Japan first. I went there with Sugano and Mike, the programmer, and Mike's wife. Mike's wife hated Japan. She couldn't stand it. I just loved every minute of it. I had taken six months of Japanese Berlitz class after work. I would really study, because the only way you're going to learn another language was when you're immersed with people that are there. Because of that, [because] we worked together with Japanese artists and designers, I wanted to learn it. I was horrible at it, but it was so fun. It's also respect for the culture, you know? And going to Japan.

Yeah, I was there when we presented our game idea (forget what it was for) to the president of Sega. I forget his name.

Maybe, yeah. He was such a nice guy. Mostly what… if you interview me, you're going to get prank stories. It was amazing to me to see Japan and every facet of it, and I love the food and I love the people and I love the culture. He gave us a tour. We didn't have time to go to Kyoto, but he took us to Nikko, which is a smaller version of Kyoto. We stayed in this resort with all these different kinds of baths. There's a eucalyptus bath and a coffee bath… You'd see a yakuza there with his girlfriend in one of the pools. At night your pillow is stuffed with rice and that's either a good thing or bad thing depending on if you like that or not. Somebody would hand you a drink with a live little fish swimming in it and you're like, "Okay."

We took a bullet train and we went to Kamakura and we saw the ocean and I loved every minute of it. We saw the temples and it reminded me of San Francisco because each city around Tokyo is its own little world. One of them is all home design goods and one is a temple, and one is a shopping district. I remember Mark and I were at some bar one night, I don't know where, and I got up and sang karaoke, and he's looking at me like I'm crazy. I got up and sang "I Left my Heart in San Francisco", but I am a singer and he didn't know that. I remember I did do some music for when Howard Drossin was there. He had me record a song for a movie he was working on, that was a lot of fun. I'm thinking, "Okay, now I want to do karaoke all over the world."

I think so, yeah. I remember how tough that was because Disney apparently has 37,000 layers of middle management. If you want to get one pixel approved, it takes a long time. I do remember that.

Yeah.

I don't remember. [laughs]

Then I did. But I honestly can't visualize… I remember the Sonic 2 artwork, and I remember some Kid Chameleon stuff… Dick Tracy, I just remember watching the movie. I remember the primary colors. I must have done some background work. Honestly, it's so long ago, my memory's not great anyway. Yeah, I'm sure I did something. We were all working on it… I think you're right. I think I do remember some backgrounds. I do.

But I don't have that artwork, that's why. It's hard to make them- I'm a visual person, and I don't have that artwork. Because we didn't have phones back then, you know?

That's right.

That's because it was just a pitch, and they didn't want to do it.

Yeah. It was basically a music-themed… I was always trying to do games that- I mean, come on, it was a 14-year-old boy's market. I remember a video game that I really loved called Earthworm Jim. I don't know if you remember that game. I thought it really appealed to women cause you got to go shopping, you got to get presents. I don't mean to sound like I'm being condescending against women, but I liked that, rather than killing a bunch of people with tanks and guns and junk. My husband can play Grand Theft Auto and Battlefield Whatever, all day long. Those games do nothing for me, you know? But I like those kind of games- I liked Earthworm Jim. I thought it was a lot of fun. I don't know… Shiny, I think, put that game out.

Anyway, what were you asking me? [laughs]

I remember that Rick Macaraeg drew the character designs for me because he was so good at it. I did backgrounds and stuff, like an urban scene. Basically, I don't remember the gameplay. It was pretty involved. They had a lot written down. A lot of people were always pitching game ideas. They were going to pick some, and they were not going to pick others, but at least you had to try, right?

Was that a Craig Stitt game?

My resume?

Okay, I don't remember that, but I might have done some work to help him with it, if it was his. Again, I'm sorry.

Have you interviewed him? Because he's probably a lot better at remembering this stuff.

[laughs] You're going to get a much better interview from him.

What was it called?

Yes. That was Rick Macaraeg's project.

Who unfortunately passed away.

Alan Ackerman passed away and Rick Macaraeg passed away. I was very close to both of these guys.

He might've had leukemia or something, it was awful. Tim Skelly, who I was really, really, really close to. We're talking about for years afterwards, [we were] very close.

Sure. Rick? Rick was like… I remember we were in a meeting with Clive Barker. I'm a huge horror buff, you know, but he and Rick really got along. I think Rick went and visited him. The kind of work that Rick did really appealed to Clive Barker, you know? Just really beautiful, haunting, dark pen and ink stuff. He also could do this amazing caricature stuff, you know? He was like a brother.

And Alan? Alan was the kind of guy that… I always teased him, and I probably feel bad that I did, but I couldn't help it. He would always make a joke and then cough and then say he was sorry after every sentence. It was easy to do an impression of him. He was a good artist and he was a really really nice guy and he was best friends with Rick. We all had a really hard time when Alan… because it's so unfair, you know. Because he's a young guy, and boom, all of a sudden you've got something horrible and you're gone.

When I moved to LA, Tim Skelly was living down there and we hung out all the time, you know? When I worked at Sega, Kurt Peterson and Tim Skelly and I were like a threesome of evil pranks. Tim was kind of above that, but Kurt and I weren't. I'll tell you a story about Kurt. Do you have Kurt Peterson on your radar?

He used to write for Æon Flux and then he came in with really strong pencil drawing skills, like hand-drawn 2D animator skills, really, really strong. Then the industry starts switching over to 3D. I think he had a hard time with that, but I'll tell you a great story. I have a great story with me and Kurt. When we were working in Foster City every day when the clock struck six, Kurt and I would skip across the street to Hotel Sofitel for piña coladas. That's how we ended our day. We were over there just hanging out, and we go back to the office and you need a key card to get into our department.

One of the Japanese guys is standing outside and he's literally shivering, shaking. I'm like, "Dude, what's the matter?" He goes, "M-M-M Michael Jackson's inside!" I'm like, "What? Get out of here." We FORGOT that we had a meeting with Michael fucking Jackson that day. We were getting drunk at the Sofitel. We go back in and we sit down and everybody's around this conference table. Michael Jackson is there with Barry Levinson, the director, and he was supposed to do some music for one of our games. We were in negotiations with him. When I met him, he's wearing all black, he's got black sunglasses and the kind of [in a high pitched voice] "Nice to meet you." He's my childhood, you know, Jackson 5 and all that. I remember buying his 45 when I was a kid. I was like, "Wow, this is crazy." Then soon after that he got involved in that, you know, legal trouble, and Sega pulled their offer. Just another day at the office. [laughs]

No, that wouldn't have been a… I don't think that would have been a Sonic product.

I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

I think Sonic [3] came after that, I think Sonic came after that meeting. I could be wrong. Maybe- no. You know what? I don't know. Honestly, I don't know. We had so many games flying around, it could have been for anything.

It could have been for a concert. I personally would say it wasn't [for a Sonic title], but, you know, I could be wrong.

Ask Craig. Craig's probably gonna know.

I just remember that… I'm living in San Francisco and I don't have a lot of… the only celebrities we ever met would come through and, you know, Sinbad was doing a TV show about being a game designer. He had to come and meet all of us. Will Vinton came to meet all of us to see what we were up to. Quincy Jones came with his wife (was it Nastassja Kinski?) But I remember when Michael Jackson and Peter Bogdanovich… was it? No, Barry Levinson. When they left, they were just in these dark SUVs with tinted windows and I thought, "Oh, I think they thought they'd have these fancy limousines, but no, just normal people."

He might've been, we didn't see him very often.

But I think that would have been an important enough meeting… [laughs] for Kurt and I to stumble in drunk, for him to be there.

I don't think it was late. I just think that we ran out of time and they cut my art. I was pretty disappointed, but when you work for a company and they hire you as an artist, that's a possibility. I did the desert level, which transformed into a Christmas level. It was only very, very recently that we were able to uncover the Christmas art because one of the guys that was really following this stuff for many years was just always bugging me. "Do you have the Christmas level? Do you remember the Christmas level?" [sarcastically] To get him off my back I went and looked at all these old VHS tapes and I sent them to this historian, and he was able to find them. They were over the moon, and sent me copies of them. I'm like, "Yep, that's it."

So you saw that artwork?

Okay, good. That was gone for so long, you know. Everything animated, and the sand animated, and it was fun to do that. I also did a forest level. I thought my levels were beautiful.

Wood Zone, that's right, and they didn't make it in.

I think that was Yasuhara's idea. He's the game designer.

He's a super, super, super nice guy, you know, really nice guy. Incredibly talented. I'm still friends with him on Facebook. I think he's teaching now.

I'm not sure. To me, those were made to be finished.

Oh, I don't know about the names. They were called Wood Zone… I called it Christmas Zone, I guess they would have called it Winter Zone. Whatever Yasuhara called them. I just created what he asked me to create.

Yes.

I think that's all I was working on, but I remember Yamaguchi was designing Knuckles [Tails] and I came up with the name Miles Prower.

Yeah.

Well, come on. [laughs] It's just a play on words, but I don't know if they wound up calling him that or Knuckles. I thought they called him Knuckles.

Miles Prower, that was me. Not Knuckles or Tails.

[incredulously] Miles Prower?

Still sounds silly, but I mean, come on.

Sonic Spinball? I think I remember working on that.

Yeah, I was having a hard time when that was going on because I was suffering from migraines. I even got in trouble because I couldn't function properly at work because I was having all these migraines. Turns out they were from birth control pills. Then when you get off the birth control pills, you stop having the migraines. [laughs] I didn't know that. I never took them again because they're poison. So that was a hard time for me, but I remember working on some of that, I think? I'm surprised they didn't fire me.

Wasn't that Craig's game, or Peter [Morawiec's]?

Yeah.

Well, then maybe Rick drew them.

I don't even know what they look like, but I know that he designed the Jester and he's just so talented, that guy. Just the range, you know? I consider myself a good artist, but that guy was a character designer extraordinaire.

Um, I guess… of the work or the whole experience?

Just the long time friends that I made. I do like the Christmas Zone. I think that was probably my favorite. Yeah, I mean years later I'm standing on stage in Japantown in San Francisco not far from where I was born and playing with my ukulele group and singing a solo and I'm looking out to see people and Alan and Rick showed up just to be there for me, you know? It's so many years later and we were friends forever, you know?

Yeah. I'm in a private group on Facebook and I haven't heard of anybody else other than Tim and Rick and Alan.

Yeah. I left in 1994 because Roger Hector decided that he wants to fire us all and hire his own people from Disney. He's the reason that the whole thing fell apart.

Yeah. I really don't like that guy. REALLY don't like that guy. He hired this British MF [Dean Lester] to come in and pretend to be some kind of art director when he was actually a hatchet man hired to come in and get rid of us all. Because Mark wasn't there anymore to protect us, because Mark got into a disagreement with Naka, the programmer for Sonic. Mark left and Naka stayed. We had six months with no boss. Then they hired Roger who sat in his office and played Solitaire all day. I just remember him telling me that he had sold his house in Calabasas, and then it had caught fire and burned down and he was cackling about it because, "Ha ha, too bad for the buyer." What a wonderful human being.

I remember sitting in Dean Lester's office with Scott Chandler and Dean's telling me, he goes, "Well, you know, you're not very talented."

I'm like, "Excuse me?" Scott's like, "Excuse me?" He was just trying to get rid of us. He's trying to make us angry enough to quit. So I quit, and I went to work for PF Magic and pretty much everybody left. Then Roger Hector drove it all into the ground and I don't think it lasted after that. The times that we had with Mark Cerny were the best, were the golden times. He and Naka just kind of got into it, because we're talking about two pretty big egos here, you know?

Naka had made billions for the company because of Sonic, so what are you going to do? I do remember one time after Sonic [2] was done, the company flew us to New York City, and I had never been there before - I'm a California girl. It was Sugano, and it was me, and it was Mark, and it was a couple of us, and we got to just go around New York City and they threw a party for us. I remember it was around Thanksgiving, so the parade was happening. They hired these guys, these hosts, you know, the MTV guys (Adam Curry, and I forget) were there hosting a party for us. I remember the president of Japan came [by] and he just gave us all wads of cash, "Here's $900." [laughs]

We had such a great time and I got to see the inside of the Statue of Liberty's head, and Sugano and I went up to the World Trade Center and had Slippery Bananas at the Windows on the World [restaurant]. We got to go and ride around on the Staten Island ferry. It was fantastic. When we were there [at STI] and it was us, it was amazing. After Mark left, it was pretty much done.

Yeah, so am I.

I'm sure I'm not the only person that has disdain for Roger Hector. I know I'm not.

I mean, we worked so hard and we had such a good time and we were very lucky to be where we were, you know? It was never going to last forever.

That was another incredible experience. I worked with Rob Fulop and it was just a magical time. So I was at the beginning of all of this craziness, and to work in downtown San Francisco in the South of Market… and also friends I will keep forever, you know? We just had so much fun.

Yes.

Yes.

No, god, no. Adam, forget his last name. I think he was ahead of the animation department, and Jesse Sugarman… and nobody got along with Adam. He was not a fun guy. The rest of us just kind of tried to get through the day, you know? Like I said, I was not an animation expert, you know? I remember he was giving me a hard time about my work there, but before working with him on Petz, I was working on projects with Rob Fulop and that was a lot more fun. It's hard because you work for these companies and then you work on projects and then they get pulled for whatever reason. You've lost all this time. You're lucky- It's kind of like being an actor. It's like for some reason you got cut and your movie didn't make it or you didn't make it into the movie and stuff like that. You're still getting paid and you're still doing the work. I do remember working on the Petz stuff and doing the animation, and that was 3D animation at that point, I believe.

3D Max? 3D Max [3D Studio Max], I think.

No, I wasn't. Everything was on this Japanese proprietary system called the Digitizer.

I probably have radiation poisoning. [laughs]

It was like working with a light bright set is what it was. It was pretty cool. I just remember, I will tell you that in 1990, the day I walked [in], the first day I sat in front of a computer, I had to go get glasses.

Yes. [laughs] Yeah, I've been wearing them ever since. Because its too much to just sit there in front of a screen like that.

[sarcastically] I know that's fascinating, but it's true.

That was another company where… y'know, PF Magic was different because there were women working there, but STI and Neversoft were pretty much all men. I remember when I went in and interviewed, the boss was really wary of having me there because he thought I was going to be one of those women that would sue with the first sign of hearing a bad joke or something. It's like, "I'm the opposite. Do you know me at all? You don't know me at all." I have really long-time friends from there, too. When I was there, I was doing 3D modeling. That's what I was doing.

I forget the name of the game. It started with an M… no. It's too long ago.

After that… I'll tell you what, you want to know how I got out of the games industry?

I was working at Neversoft and the boss gave us all like 200 megabytes of web space or something, and he goes, "You can design whatever you want." I was like, "Really?" I didn't know anything about that. So I designed a website to make fun of all my coworkers because why not? It was called Dating Advice for Geeks. I remember I would have fake people writing in. It would be Ken the programmer, but you knew it was Ken. I would disguise it and say, "This mild mannered Englishman writing in about his secret dungeon" and stuff like that, "Who has Titanic posters on his wall." You know, it was funny. It was meant to be funny.

I remember I was so excited when it got 11 hits on the Internet [laughs] and then it started getting really, really popular. One day, I get an email from a company in New York and they want to hire me [as a writer] to host their dating website, right? This is About.com. I go up to Mick West, who is one of the owners of Neversoft, and I'm like, "Is this for real? This can't be for real." Because I ignored the guy and I told the guy to stop bothering me, but he kept writing to me because he really liked what I was goofing around with this website. Mick goes, "Yeah, I think this was legit. They sent over a contract." So I took it and then I left Neversoft and started doing that. I did that for 15 years as an online dating advisor. I was at the beginning of the video games and I was at the beginning of the online dating stuff, as an expert.

Now it's all… you have to be a psychiatrist or something like that. But back then, you know, I was writing content. I've been interviewed at every magazine you could possibly imagine, and so many radio shows and television appearances, because it was really getting popular, especially for men.

Yeah. It was very novel. I was there to tell people about how it works and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people for success stories and things like that. I had to take 60 people on a singles cruise. That was so much fun. I've had a really interesting career, you know, or many careers.

But you know what? I wasn't happy at Neversoft because they were working on really hardcore guy games and I wasn't getting it. I didn't want to do that. They let me go [to About.com] and I said, "Fine, bye bye." Then I went and just took the About.com job. I worked for a couple of different dating sites, and that one, and then I got a job for Date. Com and worked as their sole content provider and spokesperson for a couple of years. Then I got married, and it's like, then I just started doing artwork for a living.

Now I build doll houses.

Yeah. I do miniatures. My doll house has 53,000 Instagram followers.

It's called @brendasdollhouse.

I did that for a while painting ukuleles and glassware.

Yeah, I did that for 10 years and then I decided… I have been collecting miniatures since I was a kid, right? I've been married for what, 18 years now? About 13 years in, I never showed my husband any of the miniatures I collected because I thought he would think I was this big dork. Finally I just pulled them all out and I was looking at him and he goes, "What is that?" My husband has a really long career as a stop motion animator in New York doing commercials and he was very successful. Then he got into movies, but when you do stop motion, you make miniatures and he loved it. When COVID came along, I built a dollhouse because what are you going to do? Right.

That dollhouse got really popular. Like my Dating Advice for Geeks, which was featured a double spread in the San Francisco Chronicle, I might add. [laughs]

I know. It's so weird. But he goes, "Oh yeah, you have to just do miniatures for a living." I'm like, "Okay." Cause I mean, I'm in Montreal. What else am I going to do? He's working on movies here and I wouldn't go get a real job because I don't speak French. So I've been doing freelance artwork forever. I'll do custom portraits of people and their pets, I do that. It just circles all the way back around to being an artist.

I absolutely am.

No, but I want to thank people for not putting any restraining orders against me. [laughs]

I was very, very fortunate to work in that time with those people (except Roger Hector and Dean Lester). It was a moment in time. I was very, very lucky, you know. I'm really happy and I'm glad people are interested in this sort of thing. It's fascinating to me that people care about this stuff so much later, years later.

What adversity? 16-bit pixels?

Yeah, but that was way late in the game, you know?

Yeah. I was the only woman in that entire group that was in Creative, though. I'm proud of that.

American. American woman. They would bring in… Aoki. His wife, she came. There were some female Japanese artists, but I never saw another [female] American artist but me.

Yeah, I don't know. [laughs] I guess it was just there were more guys interested in that sort of thing. I don't know. It's up to Mark who he hires. Maybe after hiring me, he said, "That's it."

"That's no more. Token Brenda, and we're done."

I don't mind. It was nice to rehash all of that stuff. So you have a taste of what it was like to work with me. We used to have so much fun. We did. When you get a lot of creative people together, it's just hard not to, you know?

You're welcome Alex.

Well, thank you. Same here.

Okay. Bye-bye. Thank you.