Brenda Cook

Brenda Dee Cook
Place of birth: San Francisco, California, United States
Employment history: Sega of America (1990 – 1994) Divisions: Sega Technical Institute PF Magic Neversoft
Role(s): Artist, Animator, Designer

Brenda Dee Cook (née Ross) is an American painter, illustrator, and former Sega Technical Institute animator, artist, and designer. Having been drawn to the creative arts since a young age, Ross was hired by Sega of America in 1990 as an artist and animator for a number of high-profile Sega games, and is known for her artistic contributions to titles like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Sonic Spinball. After four years with the company, she departed Sega for a job at PF Magic, where she was involved in establishing the unique animated movement in the company's very first Petz title. Following a brief stint with Neversoft, she migrated out of the game industry and into the tech sector, acting as a pioneer in the early online dating market. She has since retired from both industries and has returned to being a full-time career artist after moving to Montreal, Canada.

Career

Background

Born and raised around the San Francisco Bay Area, Ross recalls being passionate for art from at least three years old, involving herself creatively in a number of crafts projects and art contests throughout her childhood. After exiting high school, she received two scholarships for art, proceeding to attend university in both Illinois and San Francisco for fine art and design. This eventually led to her scoring her first job as a graphic designer and illustrator at the age of 17; according to her, "[since then] my entire career has revolved around fine and commercial art." Around this time, she also began a fruitful and constant career as a creative freelancer - a role she remains in to this day.

In her early career, Ross created a number of official logos for both corporations and websites. Of all her creative endeavors, perhaps the most significant was her study decorative painting from noted Southern Californian artist April Numamoto. Having been accustomed to creating and selling artistic work since she was a small girl, she recalls gaining a sense of entrepreneurial experience from working in such a varied number of creative fields for essentially her entire life - from writing to marketing, social media management to website production, and countless manners of design roles, among many others.

Sega Technical Institute

“	Nobody was working on computers back then. I did all cut-and-paste graphic design. I had an office that I shared with a printer and a marketing guy, and the three of us all gave each other work. So I show up at this interview, and Mark Cerny is there, and I forget the name of his business guy. And I think Mark had already had like… three people working in his R&D group [Sega Technical Institute] so far. Yeah, it was just Alan Ackerman, it was… forgot his name, he's a programmer, Mike… and I can't remember who else. So I go in there, I'm wearing a cute little black dress, and I sit down and I show him my stuff, and I'm thinking, “I’m completely wasting these guys' time, right?” I have a lot of different kind of artwork to show them. And I get ready to leave and Mark goes, “How much do you want?” And the guy next to him hits him and goes, “You're not supposed to say that.” [laughs] And I'm like, “Seriously?” So I thought about it. Y’know, I had been doing graphic design for a while and I thought this will be fun. I didn't know a thing about animation, but I was a good illustrator. So I took the job. We worked on these machines called Digitizers, and I learned how to create artwork… 16 pixels… [this was] a long time ago, 8 pixels? It was me and Mark and Alan and Mike, I think that might have been it so far. Then he built up the company from there, until we got to be around 35 people.	„
— Brenda Cook

Dick Tracy featured impressively large full screen graphics for the time it was released.

Ross was hired by Mark Cerny as a video game artist and animator at the newly founded Sega Technical Institute in 1990. Despite her extensive work as a traditional artist, she had little experience in the world of digital art, and had zero animation experience upon her hiring. Her first published work would be Dick Tracy, where she drew much of the title's larger character artwork (including the comic book-style cutscenes), using Sega of Japan's proprietary Digitizer system to do so. As someone with experience working in the physical arts, working with the Digitizer presented a number of challenges. "It was kind of like doing puzzles. And I'm really good with color. And I mean, once you sketched it out and you had a certain color palette you could work with, it actually wasn't that hard." After her first day of developing art on the hardware, she immediately had to go out and purchase a set of glasses. "I've been wearing them ever since. Because its too much to just sit there in front of a screen like that." To further complicate her first project, she recalls The Walt Disney Company being particularly difficult to work with regarding the approval of her artwork. "I remember how tough that was because Disney apparently has 37,000 layers of middle management. And if you want to get one pixel approved, it takes a long time."

She was one of the first STI staff chosen by Cerny to be flown overseas to visit Sega of Japan in person. In preparation of meeting the company's Japanese artists and designers, Ross took six months of Berlitz Japanese language classes. "I was horrible at it, but it was so fun." She would eventually meet and pitch an STI project directly to the president of Sega himself (likely Hayao Nakayama), who personally accompanied the developers on a trip to a resort in Nikkou. From there, the group took a bullet train to Kamakura, touring shrines and later performing karaoke. The experience left a strong impression on Ross, serving as one of her most memorable experiences with Sega.

Following Dick Tracy, Ross and STI would next be assigned to the development of Kid Chameleon, an attempt at creating a domestic mascot-type platformer for the Western Genesis market - Ross would be tasked with handling the game's animation duties. She recalls an instance where she had spent four hours creating an extensive animation of Kid Chameleon jumping and doing a mid-air flip with a motorcycle, only to have all her work accidentally erased when Alan Ackerman microwaved a bag of popcorn nearby. "Oh my god. And I'm like, “I can't kill Alan because he didn't do it on purpose.” I learned how to save my work after that. You know, once you've done something… Good times!" Ross would also conceptualize and create the company's distinctive logo. According to her, the logo was originally designed for an official jacket gifted to STI staff. "[These] logos I designed for the STI baseball style jacket. They picked the one with the rectangle with the lightbulb."

During her time at Sega, Ross worked on the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise twice: she was an animator and artist on Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (from which she recalls little, as migraines brought on by birth control withdrawal left her so debilitated through the project she felt she would lose her job), and was famously one of three American Sega staff providing artwork for Sonic the Hedgehog 2. As one of the last artists brought onto the project, she worked closely with Hirokazu Yasuhara in creating artwork and animations for both the planned Wood Zone and the multi-purpose Sand Shower Zone / Christmas Zone, even penning the name for the latter. While most of these contributions were unfortunately left on the cutting room floor, a magazine-published prerelease screenshot of Sand Shower Zone (rumored to be named "Dust Hill Zone") captivated the early Sonic community for years. It was eventually discovered to be a mockup created during her time with Sega, something which created an association between Ross and the name Dust Hill for decades to come. Regardless, she looks back on her work with pride. "Everything animated, and the sand animated, and it was fun to do that. I mean, I thought my levels were beautiful."

“	I did the desert level, which transformed into a Christmas level. I just think that we ran out of time and they cut my art. I was pretty disappointed, but when you work for a company and they hire you as an artist, that's a possibility.	„
— Brenda Cook

Most influential, however, may be her role in the creation of the name Miles Prower. According to a 2023 interview with Beep21, while the design of his new fox character had been pretty much finalized, his designer Yasushi Yamaguchi didn't have a name for him - with the character simply known as "FOXフォックス". He credits the team as a whole coming up with a new name: Naka had originally called him Mile, but that didn't meet their standards for a viable character name and was slightly altered to Miles. As revealed in a 2025 interview with Sega Retro's Alexander Rojas, Ross then suggested the name Miles Prower as an obvious speed-based pun on the term miles per hour, and the name stuck (winning over the Miles Monotail, pitched by executive Al Nilsen). However, Yamaguchi thought the word Prower sounded strange in Japanese and changed it to Power. This was met with significant protest by the American side of the team, claiming the new name just wouldn't work. From these efforts, and alongside Yamaguchi not wanting the character's name to imply he was more powerful than Sonic, the name Miles Prower was kept.

Concept art for the cancelled Fat, Daddy.

Brenda also ended up providing artwork and animation for a number of Sega Technical Institute's unreleased games as well, from pitches which died in production to projects which made it all the way to the Consumer Electronics Show (which Ross regularly attended as part of her work with STI). Projects like Broderick Macaraeg's Jester made it far along in its conceptual work for Ross to have provided artwork and animation for it, while others like B-Bomb received significants amounts of work, with that game famously receiving a detailed appearance at Summer CES 1992. Ross even planned a music-themed Genesis game by the name Fat, Daddy alongside Macaraeg, although the pitch was not picked up by management.

Ross was known for her playful nature, executing a number of elaborate pranks on her coworkers. One she is most proud of was an internal mock nature documentary filmed while their boss at STI, Mark Cerny, was out of town, in which the division's staff would appear to be doing a number of illicit or illegal things now that Cerny couldn't see them; this even involved the participation of the non-American developers. "The Japanese guys were all asleep with liquor bottles everywhere." As a result, she formed a number of strong relationships during her time at Sega Technical Institute, particularly with Alan Ackerman and Broderick Macaraeg - bonds which would remain for life. "Years later I'm standing on stage in Japantown in San Francisco not far from where I was born and playing with my ukulele group and singing a solo, and I'm looking out to see people and Alan and Rick showed up just to be there for me, you know? It's so many years later and we were friends forever, you know?"

Later career

“	The times that we had with Mark Cerny were the golden times. After Mark left, it was pretty much done. I mean, we worked so hard and we had such a good time and we were very lucky to be where we were, you know? It was never going to last forever.	„
— Brenda Cook

Like a number of other STI staff, Brenda Ross left the company in 1994. After Mark Cerny got into a disagreement with Yuji Naka, the former departed Sega entirely, leaving STI without a leader for six months. "Mark wasn't there anymore to protect us." Eventually, management brought in Roger Hector, who was almost immediately disliked by a notable amount of STI developers. Hector then proceeded to hire Dean Lester to "come in and pretend to be some kind of art director when he was actually a hatchet man hired to come in and get rid of us all."

“	I remember sitting in Dean Lester's office with Scott Chandler and Dean's telling me, he goes, “Well, you know, you're not very talented. I'm like, “Excuse me?” And Scott's like, “Excuse me?” He was just trying to get rid of us. He's trying to make us angry enough to quit. So I quit, and I went to work for PF Magic and pretty much everybody left. Then Roger Hector drove it all into the ground and I don't think it lasted after that. So the times that we had with Mark Cerny were the best, were the golden times. He and Naka just kind of got into it, because we're talking about two pretty big egos here, you know?	„
— Brenda Cook

"PF Magic was different because there were women working there; STI and Neversoft were pretty much all men."

Ross reportedly left most of her Sega work at STI's offices before departing. She soon migrated to an animation position at fellow San Francisco developer PF Magic, working on seminal titles like the very first Dogz: Your Computer Pet. In particular, she recalls working in 3D Studio Max, and played a role in the creation of the Petz' iconic 3D animations.

Following PF Magic, Ross was also briefly employed for Neversoft. "I remember when I went in and interviewed, the boss was really wary of having me there because he thought I was going to be one of those women that would sue with the first sign of hearing a bad joke or something." Thankfully she got the job and was soon employed as a 3D modeler, contributing art to the 1997 PlayStation release of MDK. Unfortunately, Ross recalls being largely unhappy with her time at Neversoft "because they were working on really hardcore guy games and I wasn't getting it. I didn't want to do that." Despite this, she would still go on to develop a number of long-time friendships from the experience.

With the advent of the internet, Neversoft had decided to give all their employees 200 megabytes of hosted web space for them to do with whatever they please. As a lighthearted prank, Ross created an online version of a magazine's dating column centered around her Neversoft coworkers, with fictional reports of their humorous and embarrassing personal traits; she named her new website "Dating Advice for Geeks". While intended purely as humor, the website was discovered by a representative of About.com, who reached out to the artist in hopes of recruiting her and using her expertise in the burgeoning online dating industry. While she rejected the headhunting offer at first, she later consulted with Neversoft owner and cofounder Mick West, and eventually decided to take the offer.

“	I remember I was so excited when it got 11 hits on the internet [laughs] and then it started getting really, really popular. And one day, I get an email from a company in New York and they want to hire me [as a writer] to host their dating website, right? This is About.com. I go up to Mick West, who is one of the owners of Neversoft, and I'm like, “Is this for real? This can't be for real.” Because I ignored the guy and I told the guy to stop bothering me, but he kept writing to me because he really liked what I was goofing around with this website. And Mick goes, “Yeah, I think this was legit. They sent over a contract.” So I took it and then I left Neversoft and started doing that. I did that for 15 years as an online dating advisor. So I was at the beginning of the video games and I was at the beginning of the online dating stuff, as an expert.	„
— Brenda Cook

After her exit from the video game industry, she would spend further time in the online dating industry, migrating to Date.com as the company's sole content provider and spokesperson. Following this, she married a professional animator in the Hollywood film industry, assumed the surname Cook, and largely retired to work on her art. She founded and operated an independent graphic design and illustration business selling commissioned watercolor portraits to local clients in her new home of Montreal, Canada. Most prominent of her creative fronts was Lemon Tree Workshop, established sometime around mid 2014 as the official outlet for Cook's decorative painting work.

“	I really love what I do. I think that's the key to living a good life.	„
— Brenda Cook

Outside of work, she also sings and performs in a Hawaiian ukulele band, enjoys casual painting and gardening (particularly under the gaze of her backyard Meyer Lemon tree), and likes watching scary movies with her husband. She also maintains an online presence through the popular Instagram account @brendasdollhouse, where she shares updates on her elaborately detailed dollhouse and other miniature work.

Legacy

At the dawn of the 2000s, Brenda Cook (through her association with the fabled "Dust Hill Zone" mockup) eventually drew the attention of the Sonic fanbase, resulting in at least two contemporary instances of members of the community reaching out to her for questions. Unfortunately, in the first instance, Sonic scene member ICEknight had discovered Cook's personal email address for use in a potential interview, but had publicly posted it on a popular Sonic forum before doing so; reportedly, this caused Cook to be "flooded" with repeated Dust Hill questions "over and over." As a result, she would end up replying to only a single email from the community - speaking very briefly with a scene member named Deviance in February 2001.

In this first interview, she reveals that even the American side of Sega Technical Institute was forced to use the Japanese-preferred Digitizer during the development of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. She cites a lack of time for the development team to properly integrate these zones into the game as the primarily reason for their absence from the final product. In this interview, she also confirms that she was personally unaware of the Zone never having a proper name outside Desert Zone. However, as Deviance frequently uses the name Dust Hill, Cook occasionally refers to the stage under this name too; as one of the goals of said interview was to confirm the stage's name, ICEknight was forced to provide a clarification when first publishing the interview.

Brenda Cook's master VHS video resume

Following this, another member of the Sonic scene by the name of WetflameG tracked down Cook, locating her instant messaging username and reaching out to ask further Dust Hill questions. Cook took the time to confirm that the name Desert Zone was simply a descriptive working title (like Wood Zone) which would have been likely changed for the final product. She also reconfirmed that the Zone never made it to the final game, limited to development hardware and never having left Sega Technical Institute's offices. She recalls the game's designer, Hirokazu Yasuhara, was particularly fond of said stage, and was reportedly just as upset as Cook when the two learned it would not be included in the final game. She reveals that, as she was one of the last artists added to the project, the development team was already in crunch by the time she arrived, resulting in a curious production schedule for her late Sonic 2 contributions.

In December 2023, a VHS tape containing a video resume made by Cook around the mid 1990s - containing her artwork from a number of cancelled Sega Technical Institute projects, and PF Magic's Dogz - was preserved and uploaded to YouTube by The Video Game History Foundation in December 2023. In it, animations and artwork from largely undocumented titles such as Jester and Fat, Daddy were seen by the public for the first time, serving as a fascinating time capsule into Cook's work on the 16-bit Sega Genesis.

In March 2025, Sega Retro editor Alexander Rojas conducted an interview with Cook regarding her career and time at STI, providing a great deal of new information on both topics. Of particular note was the discovery of Cook's involvement in the naming of Miles Prower, as was the sharing of development anecdotes and the overall feel and mood of Sega Technical Institute. Crucially, Brenda also provided a personal insight into friends from STI who have since passed on, including Alan Ackerman, Rick Macaraeg, and Tim Skelly.

“	I was very, very fortunate to work in that time with those people. It was a moment in time. I was very, very lucky, you know. I’m really happy and I'm glad people are interested in this sort of thing. It's fascinating to me that people care about this stuff so much later.	„
— Brenda Cook

Production history (Ross)

• Dick Tracy (Mega Drive; 1991) — Artist
• Kid Chameleon (Mega Drive; 1992) — Art
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive; 1992) — Zone Artists
• Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball (Mega Drive; 1993) — Art
• Ballz 3D (Mega Drive; 1994) — Special Thanks to
• B-Bomb (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Artists
• Fat, Daddy (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Designer
• Fat, Daddy (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Backgrounds Art
• Jester (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Artists
• Jester (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Animators
• Spinny & Spike (Mega Drive; unreleased) — Designer

Gallery

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Interviews

• Interview: Brenda Cook (2001-02) by Deviance
• Interview: Brenda Cook (200x) by WetflameG
• Interview: Brenda Cook (2015-11-25) by Cindy deRosier
• Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10) by Alexander Rojas

Photographs

Main article: Photos of Brenda Cook

External links

• Official website (Lemon Tree Workshop) (archived)