When Roger Hector graduated from the ArtCenter College Of Design in Los Angeles, he was all set to design cars for a living. Then the oil crisis hit, the automobile industry crashed and he took a sharp turn into the arcade business, first at Atari and then Sente, which he jointly founded. His skills as an artist, designer and later as a manager, saw him enjoy a storied career at some of the best-known videogame companies of the last five decades and he’s still making games today for the educational charity The Singleton Foundation. “Last year, I went to reunions for both Atari and Sega,” smiles Roger. “I had a lot of fun meeting up again with Nolan Bushnell, Tom Kalinske and all these people I hadn’t seen for a long time that were involved back in our day. Everyone had fun… but then everyone enjoyed that period of time.”
Over your long career, you have worked at some of the biggest names in the industry, including Atari, Bally Sente, Electronic Arts, Disney, Sega and Namco Bandai. Which one were you happiest at?
Oh gosh, that is a tough one to answer because for me, it’s been multiple decades and every one of those companies had its own qualities, its own pluses and minuses. I did really enjoy Atari because when I first joined, no one really knew what Atari was. It was almost non-existent.
How did you find out about it, then?
I had a college friend, Peter Takaichi, who worked there. I had moved to the Midwest [of America] and really wasn’t enjoying it because the weather was terrible [laughs]. I wanted to come back to California! I grew up in San Jose, pretty close to this strange company Pete worked for called Atari. He said they had made , which
