He went through the Second City-affiliated (now defunct) Players Workshop school, and indeed, he would leave Chicago and follow a theatre company to Los Angeles he still lives there, still acts in the occasional Southern California stage production. He was growing entranced by improv and the scope of Chicago theatre. Warren Davis doesn’t really give a he really wanted to do was act.Įven as he was working on Q*bert with graphics designer Jeff Lee (who created the character itself) and sound designer David Thiel (who generated those garbled swears), acting was his Plan B. He had a nose like a boat horn and unintelligibly cursed whenever he died. He knows that as original as the game once seemed, it’s now largely remembered for its titular character, who was orange and squat and of an indeterminate species. Despite creating IP once splashed across T-shirts, socks, lunchboxes, Saturday morning cartoons and, more recently, Disney’s “Wreck-It Ralph” and Adam Sandler’s “Pixels,” Davis knows you don’t care that the dude who came up with Q*bert doesn’t get recognised by motorists in suburban Chicago. Forty years ago, when Davis co-created the once-ubiquitous Q*bert, like many of the early architects of gaming culture, he was just an anonymous Chicago video game designer. If they spent too much time in dark, seedy arcades in the ‘80s, they might.Īssuming anyone knew what designers of classic video games looked like. I had been planning to meet with him for so long that as we walked along Ogden Avenue to Galloping Ghost Arcade, I half-expected drivers to shout from passing cars: “Hey, Q*bert Guy!” If they were Gen X, they might. But that’s who he is: Warren Davis, the Q*bert Guy. Which is an impolite way to introduce you to Warren Davis. That’s how I referred to him - the Q*bert Guy.
That’s how my editor referred to him - the Q*bert Guy.
I met the Q*bert Guy in suburban Brookfield, Illinois, the other day.
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