PAUL NIEMEYER

Your email address is ‘whatisart4’ so let’s start there. What do you think art is for?

[Laughs] That’s a good question and I’m usually the one asking it! [Puts on hippie voice] “Yeah, baby, I want you to think about that, maaaan.” I think it’s to enhance, to entertain… and you cannot touch anything in your everyday life that didn’t have an artist involved somewhere. Somebody had to design everything. We are immersed in art.

You have worked on many arcade titles but also everything from board games to advertising campaigns for Budweiser and Jack Daniel’s. Does each project require a different mindset?

I approach every project the same way: gather up all the information I need, lay it out, look at it like a puzzle and let it come together, like in the [Netflix series] The Queen’s Gambit when she sees the pieces moving on the ceiling…

We hope you’ve not been taking as many drugs as her.

We’re not being recorded, right? We are? Then no comment.

Did you study art?

I have a double major in illustration and ceramic design from Eastern Illinois University but in college, I was addicted to pinball, to the point I’d show up at the start of class, sign the register and then slip off to play pinball in the student centre all afternoon. Even back then, in the back of my head I was thinking, “Someday I’ll be a pinball artist and all shall worship me.”

It must have felt like that was coming true when you joined Bally Midway in 1982.

I was actually hired by Midway. They were building this huge white brick, black glass building, and it was pretty effin’ cool. We nicknamed it ‘the house that Pac built’ because of all. That became kind of poignant years later when things didn’t work out quite as well as they’d planned.