John Vogel

In grade school I was always known as 'the kid who could draw.' In high school I was known as 'The Artist.' My parents saw the potential and sent me to The American Academy of Art in Chicago.

After graduating, My intentions were to start a career in comic books or comic strips. I had my own characters and story lines that I would feverishly draw up. Working at a grocery store, I had a small notepad on which I would write comic strip ideas (the monotony of ringing up groceries is good for thinking). Once I was out of school 'officially', I learned of a new course at 'The Academy' that focused on computer graphics and took that for a semester. I figured computer graphics would be a good idea to have in my skill set. It was probably the best decision I could have made.

I landed a job working at Williams/Bally/Midway as a video game artist/designer. I've developed video games such as 'Terminator 2', 'Mortal Kombat', 'Injustice', and others. It's been an amazing 20+ year career of creating and designing character models, environments, special effects, animation (I've been doing Motion Capture for as long as its been around), and story writing.

The thing that I WASN'T doing was painting or drawing. Everything I did was on the co...