British · 1980s
The airbrush behind Ocean Software — the man who painted the covers that made a cassette of coloured blocks look like a blockbuster film, and who designed Ocean's logo.
Bob Wakelin was an illustrator from Liverpool who produced a vast body of box artwork for Ocean Software and its sister label Imagine through the 1980s and 1990s, and who also designed Ocean's logo. He worked for Marvel UK as well, and his style — hyper-detailed, dramatically lit, airbrushed to a photographic sheen — was the visual signature of the British software industry at its commercial peak. His situation was one every artist of the era shared and few handled as well. The games he was painting were, on the hardware of the day, a handful of coloured blocks; the cover had to sell a fantasy the machine could not render. Wakelin's covers do not attempt to depict the game. They depict what the game is <em>about</em>, at the fidelity of a film poster, and a generation of British children bought cassettes on the strength of them. His credits span titles including Athena, Contra, Epic and Choplifter III, and his last work for Ocean was Central Intelligence in 1994. He moved afterwards into children's book illustration before ill health forced his retirement. He was a regular presence at UK gaming expos, where he sold and signed prints of his own work, and he died in January 2018 after a period of illness with leukaemia.