William L. Eaken

In 1981 William (Bill) L. Eaken entered college to study art, but quickly found himself concentrating on philosophy instead. In 1984, he returned to his first love and went to California State University, Fullerton, to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration and Design (1987). In 1989 he completed the Advanced Illustration Program at the Art Technical Institute at Huntington Beach, Ca.

For the next 10 years he enjoyed an exciting and varied career as an artist in the entertainment industry, creating everything from advertising and poster art, traditional animation, and magazine and book cover illustration. He has created work for Rhino Records, Paramount Pictures, Steven Spielberg, and NASA, to name a few.

Eaken entered the game industry at Sierra On-Line. Originally he was contracted to work on games, but after they saw some slides of his work, they put him in the marketing department, where he developed marketing strategies and created layouts and illustrations (1988-1990).

After Sierra he worked for Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts. He was initially hired to work on the sequel to Loom, called Forge, but that project was put on hold. His first assignment was to turn the first 16 color of Secret of Monkey Island into 256 colors, and as there was a small budget for it, he had to finish it with two other artists in one month. His next project was Indiana Jones: The Fate of Atlantis, for which he was the lead artist and designed, besides backgrounds, all the Atlantean artefacts and architecture, and even the box cover. He continued to work on various other well-known LucasArts titles till 1998. He also worked on Mysterious Island (1996, Virgin Sound and Vision).

Though Eaken considered his many experiences during this period as an invaluable training ground, he never felt the commercial work captured for him that magical element that first drew him to the arts. So in 1998 he began pursuing his own mystical vision.

After a long break, Eaken started to work on games again. Recently he has contributed to various games: Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run (2006), The Exchange Student episode 1 and 2 (2006/7), Alien Syndrome (2007), and A Vampyre Story (2008).