Keynote: "A long, long time ago, at a video game company not far, far away..."
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Location
West Reading Room, North
Start Date
27-9-2025 2:30 PM
End Date
27-9-2025 4:00 PM
Description
This is Paul's 100th appearance at a con or fest!
A trip to the 1980s and 1990s and the golden age of video games. Stories and experiences of working at Bally/Midway with some of the most talented and innovative artists of the day.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
COinS
Sep 27th, 2:30 PM
Sep 27th, 4:00 PM
Keynote: "A long, long time ago, at a video game company not far, far away..."
West Reading Room, North
This is Paul's 100th appearance at a con or fest!
A trip to the 1980s and 1990s and the golden age of video games. Stories and experiences of working at Bally/Midway with some of the most talented and innovative artists of the day.
Comments
Paul Niemeyer
Paul E. Niemeyer received a Bachelor of Arts from Eastern Illinois University in 1979. While at EIU, he studied 2 and 3 dimensional art, graphic and advertising art, and an un-scheduled, and unexpected, education playing pinball in the Student Union!
Paul is probably best known for being the artist of the first Mortal Kombat game cabinet, control panel, and header, including illustrating the Mortal Kombat logo, but Paul's artwork appears on dozens of other iconic and famous games as well. The most notable are TRON, Tapper, Satan's Hollow, Spy Hunter, Wacko, Super PacMan, PacMan Plus, Professor PacMan, and Demolition Man Pinball. Most recently he did the sculpts for the American Pinball game "Legends of Valhalla," and has done a myriad of other games and prototypes in years of doing electronic game art, including being an employee of Bally-Midway from 1982-1984
From the mid-1980s Paul freelanced for big ad agencies on movie licenses like Jurassic Park 2, Men in Black, Star Trek 6, Little Mermaid, Hercules, Star Wars Phantom Menace, Pirates of the Caribbean, and many more.
From 2000-2005 he was part owner of Eagle Games Board Company, which is now Eagle-Gryphon Games. Paul designed and illustrated dozens of games and their components, as well as being the overall creative director. Eagle Games published titles like "Railroad Tycoon", "Age of Mythology", "Sid Meier's Civilization", "Napoleon in Europe", "The American Civil War", and dozens of other board and tabletop games. After selling Eagle Games, Paul designed and illustrated many games in Europe and the US, including the very popular "Through the Ages" and the hugely successful PopCap games, Peggle and Bejeweled 2.
Paul owned and ran ABYSS Haunted House, a top 10 haunted attraction in the Chicagoland area, from 2006-2014 and has recently done packaging artwork on 9 Nintendo Switch Games (Super Blood Hockey, Pigeon Dev Games Bundle, Demons Tier +, A Robot Named FIGHT, Cathedral, Rack 'n Ruin, Super Dungeon Maker, and Turbo Kid) for Premium Edition Games, and very recently the packaging art for the re-release of the 1982 cult classic, Satan's Hollow.
Paul now designs and builds props & dark rides for theme parks, escape rooms, seasonal fests, and haunted attractions all over the world. Paul's murals and sculptures are in dozens of restaurants and venues all over America. Paul has an endless treasure trove of behind the scenes stories and experiences from the early gaming days of the 1980's and 30+ years in Chicago ad agencies.