Bob Wakelin | Code Like It's 198x

Bob Wakelin painted the covers that sold Ocean Software’s games, and he did not play them. “I never touched them,” he said of computer games. He was in his late twenties when the home computer boom began, and to him it was “a kids’ thing”. What he wanted was to draw comics. Ocean wanted a picture on every cassette that would stand out in WH Smith and Boots, and from 1984 Wakelin supplied nearly all of them, at a pace that sometimes meant a finished painting in a couple of days. In 1988 The Games Machine called him “Ocean’s most famous artist”.

Fast facts

Born: 1952 or 1953; CRASH gave his age as 32 in July 1985.
Trained: a three-year graphics course at an art college in north Wales.
Based: Liverpool.
Worked for: Ocean and its Imagine label, as a freelance, from Ocean’s first games in 1984 into the mid-1990s; also Special FX, and covers for Computer & Video Games and Sinclair User.
Method: a tight pencil drawing, airbrushed over so the pencil showed through, finished in gouache or felt pen; Photoshop from about 2000.
Died: January 2018.

Comics first

Wakelin grew up copying American comics. The British ones, the Beano and Dandy, “didn’t mean anything to me”, he said; Marvel “was what really inspired me”, and Jack Kirby above all. His teachers told him people did not look like that. He went to art college in Wales and, after a spell on the dole, joined a Liverpool studio that made artwork for the entertainment industry, including album covers for rock bands, and worked his way up to studio manager. He went freelance in 1978 and drew for Marvel, but the exchange rate meant it “didn’t pay too handsomely”. In 1980 he joined a band as a synthesiser player.

His route into games came through another artist, an older man called Blair, who knew David Ward and Jon Woods, the founders of what was then Spectrum Games. Ward and Woods signed the pair up at a meeting in a Liverpool pub. (In 1985 he had told CRASH a simpler version: he heard through a friend of a friend that Ward was starting a software house in Manchester and needed an illustrator.) Moon Alert (1984) was the first job they did together, and Wakelin remembered Blair drawing the background of Gilligan’s Gold while he did the main character. The partnership did not last; Wakelin carried on alone. By July 1985 CRASH reported that he did “all the inlay illustrations for Ocean”, which was by then nearly half his work, alongside “occasional covers for C&VG and comic books too — just so I don’t forget how to draw superheroes”. Computer & Video Games credited him with its covers for June 1984 and February 1985.

How he worked

In 1985 Wakelin told CRASH that a painting took four or five days: “I spend a day referencing it, and then three or four days completing the artwork. I start off by doing a very tight drawing in pencils, filling in all the detail and then airbrush over so that some of the pencil lines come through the colour. I don’t like the tubular, plastic look of most airbrush work and find that the pencil technique avoids that.” He finished with small details in gouache or felt pen. He was not tempted by the computer screen: “I’m not a lover of computer graphics… I would get frustrated about not being able to get the detail I want into a picture on a TV screen.”

Looking back, he said there was “no art direction whatsoever”. Ocean trusted him to go away and produce something, often without seeing the game; for Match Day the brief was to find a football book, copy some pictures and change the faces and kits. Early jobs were sometimes done in a couple of days, and he said that was why “so much of that early stuff” was poor. He thought little of his own Daley Thompson’s Decathlon cover (“I can understand why it’s iconic… but technically…”), and remembered Wizball, which many consider his best, as a rare job where the programmers showed him a demo. He hand-lettered the titles with a ruler, a skill from the typography classes he had resisted at art college. The airbrush kit lived on an A0 drawing board: a compressor, Dr Martin inks, scalpels and masking film, and torn toilet roll to spray smoke and explosions.

The covers

Wakelin’s paintings were on the cassettes, in the magazine advertisements and on the posters. A Sinclair User reader in 1989, writing about Operation Wolf, called him “that wicked artist Bob Wakelin whose name is on the front of every poster you lay your hands on”. The Games Machine wrote in 1988 that he had illustrated “nearly every game Ocean has published”, and gave away his original painting for Special FX’s Firefly as a competition prize. Zero reported in 1990 that although Ocean’s art department sometimes had input, “it’s usually Bob who comes up with the image that sells a game”.

The covers that can be tied to him include Moon Alert, Road Frogger, Caterpilla, Match Day and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon from Ocean’s first years; Batman, Ocean’s DC Comics licence, for which DC asked only that he shorten Batman’s ears; Wizball, Athena, Billy the Kid, Highlander and The Great Escape; the advertisement for Gryzor, whose soldier ZZAP!64 thought looked suspiciously like the cover of the press material for the film Predator; Operation Wolf, Firefly, Pud Pud in Weird World, The New Zealand Story and Parasol Stars; and, in the 1990s, Mr Nutz, Central Intelligence and Kid Chaos. He also designed Special FX’s logo and many of its covers, and painted at least one cover for Sinclair User, in March 1986, for Imagine.

Not everything was used. For Miami Vice he painted a cover only for Don Johnson’s agent to refuse any illustration of the actor’s face, so a photograph went on the box. Stephen Ian Thomson, the artist on the Commodore 64 Untouchables, believed that likeness problems were the reason Wakelin was commissioned to paint an alternative cover, which was never used; he put part of it in the game as a title screen. Ocean turned down one painting outright, for Kid Chaos (1994), as too violent, and had a studio artist alter it. Ocean’s management also realised that a good picture could help a weak game. Wakelin recalled being asked, for Highlander, to “do a real number on it” because the game was poor, and said that was when he “realised I was worth a bit more money to Ocean” and started putting his prices up.

Some of his paintings drew complaints. Edge reported in 2002 that his Athena cover had brought “a lot of outraged letters” to Ocean.

After Ocean

The work dried up in the 1990s as Ocean made fewer games. Wakelin’s account is that his last Ocean commission came a little under two years before Infogrames bought the company, after David Ward queried an invoice for Central Intelligence. When Ocean cleared its warehouse in 1997, the art department’s Carl Pugh warned him that his originals were about to go in a skip, and he drove over with a friend in a van to save what he could.

Around 2000 he moved to Photoshop, learning to “airbrush with a mouse” and later a pen; within a year or so, he said, about 95 per cent of his work was digital. He was surprised to find, through retro gaming events, how many people still loved the Ocean covers, and by the early 2010s most of his original paintings had gone to collectors. Retro Gamer put his Great Escape painting on its cover in April 2012.

Wakelin died in January 2018. MCV’s obituary called his style “perfect for making games leap off the shelf”.

Sources

CRASH issue 18, July 1985, pp. 132–133: profile of Bob Wakelin (comics, the Liverpool studio and album covers, freelance from 1978, Marvel, the band in 1980, the first job for Ocean, “all the inlay illustrations for Ocean”, C&VG covers, his method and its four or five days, his age).
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The History of Ocean Software (Revival Retro Events, 2013), pp. 229–246, “Bob Wakelin – The Artist”: interview-led chapter; quotations are Wakelin’s recollections (Blair, Moon Alert and Gilligan’s Gold; comics and Jack Kirby; art college; the briefs; Match Day, Road Frogger and Caterpilla; Batman and DC; Miami Vice; Kid Chaos; Mr Nutz; Highlander; Wizball, Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, Athena, Billy the Kid, The New Zealand Story, Parasol Stars and Central Intelligence; the invoices; the 1997 warehouse; his equipment; Photoshop; collectors).
Computer & Video Games issue 32, June 1984, p. 3, and issue 40, February 1985, p. 3: covers credited to Bob Wakelin.
Sinclair User issue 48, March 1986, p. 4: “Cover illustration Bob Wakelin for Imagine”.
ZZAP!64 issue 31, November 1987, p. 49: the Gryzor advertisement and the Predator resemblance.
The Games Machine issue 5, April 1988, p. 86: “Ocean’s most famous artist”; the Firefly painting competition.
Sinclair User issue 83, February 1989, p. 22: reader’s letter on Operation Wolf and Wakelin’s posters.
Zero issue 3, January 1990, p. 32: Ocean’s advertising and Wakelin’s role.
Edge issue 114, September 2002, pp. 42–43: feature on box art (the Athena complaints).
Commodore 64: a visual Commpendium (Bitmap Books, 2014), p. 94: Stephen Ian Thomson on The Untouchables title screen.
Retro Gamer issue 101, April 2012, p. 60: Wakelin’s Great Escape art on the cover.
Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, pp. 36–37: Special FX (logo and covers by Wakelin; Firefly).
Wireframe issue 8, February 2019, p. 45 (Wizball); issue 16, June 2019, p. 49 (Pud Pud in Weird World); issue 24, October 2019, p. 51 (Special FX covers and logo).
Next issue 13, April 2026, p. 56: Moon Alert, with Wakelin’s cassette art.
“80s cover art legend Bob Wakelin has passed away”, MCV, 22 January 2018 (web, secondary). https://www.mcvuk.com/business/80s-cover-art-legend-bob-wakelin-has-passed-away
Chris Kerr, “Obituary: Iconic video game cover artist Bob Wakelin”, Game Developer, 22 January 2018 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/art/obituary-iconic-video-game-cover-artist-bob-wakelin
Lambiek Comiclopedia, “Bob Wakelin” (web, secondary): born 1952. https://www.lambiek.net/artists/w/wakelin_bob.htm