Gamasutra has an in-depth profile of Steve Englehart’s career, detailing his work in comics and video games. Englehart’s career in both areas (as well as animation, film and prose) spans decades; he’s written everything from Avengers to Batman to his own creations, like Night Man and Strangers. See the complete list of his credits over on his website, where you can also read about projects that never made it out, like a series of Mark Twain educational video games.
A couple of “what might have been” moments from the article piqued my interest … first, when Englehart talks about a potential Camelot 3000 game he was asked to work on:
This lead to one interesting encounter, when he was asked to work on a video game adaptation of Camelot 3000, a limited series written by Mike W. Barr and penciled by Brian Bolland and published by the Warner owned DC Comics – coincidentally, the same company that owned Atari at the time. “I had one foot in comics once again, doing Coyote, but I had the other foot, on a daily basis, in computers,” Englehart says. “When Mike came to see about turning his comic, Camelot 3000, into a game, he had both of his feet in the arena I’d partially left, and I just felt like I was no longer a comics guy with him, while I was ‘the comics guy’ to my fellow Atari-ites.”
It wasn’t, he adds, a “big thing”, pointing out that since then it has happened a number of other times. “I’ve gone on to do television and animation; I have feet in about six worlds now, and they’re always overlapping,” he notes.
And second, when he talks about The Tribes:
Prior to that however, in 2002, Englehart worked alongside the latest incarnation of Atari on a project called The Tribes, which would have seen Atari’s game populated with a close-knit group of characters – similar to the idea used for the Utraverse. Englehart had developed the entire world – all of the characters and their interpersonal relationships – only to find that the company decided not to follow through with the actual games.
“It would have been amazing,” he says, somewhat mournfully. “There’s never been anything like it, and I really can’t understand why the new Atari didn’t follow through; it would have been the biggest thing in company branding ever. But as always, I sit in my room and make things entertaining, and then management sits in its room and does whatever they do…”
