Joseph B. Hewitt

Joseph B. Hewitt IV
Place of birth: United States
Employment history: Westwood Studios (1988 – 2002) Sony Online Entertaiment (2003-06 – 2004-01)
Role(s): Senior Artist, Programmer
Education: University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1986-1988; BSc Computer Science), College of Southern Nevada (1995-1998; BA Photography & Creative Writing)
Twitter: @joseph4th

Joseph B. Hewitt IV is an American video game developer and former Westwood Studios senior artist and programmer, most known for his art and design work on titles like the groundbreaking Command & Conquer. He also created the early Mega Drive art production tool MegaWICE, included with Sega of America's official Genesis development kit.

Career

Joseph B. Hewitt IV was first introduced to the world of video games in the mid 1980s, when his mother enrolled him in the Las Vegas-based Computer Learning Center for Children, a business which also developed educational software under the name Unicorn Software. Hewitt began working for the company in 1985 as both an artist and designer, developing software while tutoring children in computers at the same time. His first release was the Commodore 64 game Animal Kingdom. Hewitt lists one of his early inspirations was a behind-the-scenes documentary on the 1984 film The Last Starfighter demonstrating the use of computers in generating visual effects for the spacecraft scenes - "I thought that 3D stuff was cool and I wanted to do that for a living."

Brett Sperry, co-founder of Westwood Associates, had worked for Unicorn Software for a brief time, and hired Hewitt as an act of generosity. He served as a key figure within Westwood for 14 years, but never actually got to work in 3D, as his technical proficiency saw him almost exclusively assigned to tasks like 2D art implementation. "While everybody was learning 3D Studio and doing stuff that would eventually become Command & Conquer, I was working on The Lion King taking pictures and crunching them down into 8x8 character graphics where lots of tiles were cleverly repeated when rebuilding the entire picture in as few characters as possible." Once development on The Lion King had concluded, Hewitt slowly began working on Command & Conquer assets, and was soon incorporated into the development team proper.

Hewitt remained working for Westwood Studios until Electronic Arts began laying off developers. During his time with the company, Hewitt was involved in the art or design of all but 2 or 3 of the company's games. Following his layoff, he migrated to Sony Online Entertainment as a customer service representative for the launch of Star Wars Galaxies. While working with Sony, he attempted to acquire a position as a designer for EverQuest, but left after it became clear this wasn't going to happen.

He then spent 5 years in Australia working as a director for Auran Games and Interzone Games. In 2009, he returned to Las Vegas and joined Brett Sperry’s new company Jet Set Games as a designer, later graduating to Creative Director. While Hewitt left the position in 2009, he still resides in Vegas, and is currently looking to return to the video game industry.

Production history

• The Lion King (Mega Drive; 1994) — Background Art (as Joseph B Hewitt IV)
• Command & Conquer (Saturn; 1996) — Artists (as Joseph B. Hewitt IV)
• MegaWICE (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Created by (as Joseph B. Hewitt IV)

Interviews

• Interview: Joseph B. Hewitt (2017-11-25) by Asagoth

Photographs

Main article: Photos of Joseph B. Hewitt

External links

• Official website
• Joseph B. Hewitt at LinkedIn