Little Fluffy Clouds

My career in the video game industry began on Friday August 13, 1993 working in the stop-motion animation studio at Atari Games with "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow for $8.50/hr.

My duties at first were mundane, clicking the correct button at the designated signal from Pete, but as my interest and proficiency increased, and my responsibilities expanded to managing the stop-motion studio as well as the graphics processing pipeline due to the promotion of my co-worker I soon found myself working the copious hours Pete kept just to keep the graphics machine going.

At the time, our working conditions in the 'Black Hole' were a bare-bones concrete floor, a 5-foot stage and lighting rig, a capture computer and processing computer, as well as a boom box cranking The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, ABBA, Steely Dan, and Deep Forest.

As a result of my work in the stop-motion studio, and my drive to take on more responsibilities such as editing special move tables, assisting in the production of the Arcade Strategy Guide with GamePro magazine, countless hours of testing and debugging, and drafting and editing dozens of pages describing the stop-motion process and our setup which eventually became United States Patent 5,519,826 - Stop motion animation system, I was hired full-time as Atari Games' first Production Coordinator in September of 1994.

I truly enjoyed the hours spent in the stop-motion lab with Pete Kleinow, and I never fully realized the extent of his musical talent and career - Pete was just another hard-working guy like me. He and I worked together on Primal Rage 2, with fellow special effects artist Jon Berg, Pete's son Cosmo, and two graphics processing interns but the sequel never saw the light of day, being overshadowed by flashy 3D fighters in the arcade.

Pete Kleinow passed away in early 2007.

Here's hoping you're sitting upon Little Fluffy Clouds, El Paso.

- Steve