Mike Milo’s Journal

After I graduated Art School, I went to work off and on at a small studio in NYC called Broadcast Arts which made animated commercials. I was luckily enough to work on a Honey Nut Cheerios commercial, a Flintstone’s Pushups commercial, a Battleship commercial as well as a TNT commercial and a Indonesian seasoning ad. trouble was there was not much work in NYC and from what I’ve heard there still isn’t so I could not work steadily and began to think that I had to find another job. I was kinda depressing because I had just gone to school for three full years to learn how to animate and there was no work to be had. At the time I was living with a girl who as none to happy about my lack of employment and we broke up as a result which is ironic. I had gone to the school I did in Jersey to stay with her (I had wanted to go to a school called Cal Arts in L.A.) and now that I had graduated we were breaking up. Funny how life works out.

Anyway, my lucky break came in the form of a call from our school principal who was a friend of mine and she told me of a studio called Sierra OnLine in Yosemite looking for animators for video games. I took the job immediately and soon found myself out in sunny CA. with my friend Harry who had also procured a job from them.

The Summer Home We Lived in for the Winter

We found ourselves in this little podunk town at the top of a mountain in the middle of the hottest weather I’d ever encountered. It regularly got up to 108 every day. If it had gotten to 108 in Jersey, people would have died. Here it was what people called a ‘dry heat’ and it did make a difference but it was still hot as Hell. We settled in and enjoyed ourselves, made some friends, a few enemies and generally had a ball. We went to Yosemite Park regularly and if you’ve never been there I highly recommend it as it is a sight unlike anywhere else int eh world. Half Dome (incidentally the logo for Sierra Games) and El Capitan were incredible wonders this Jersey boy had never seen the likes of. We went down a natural water slide which was basically slick mountain face at a 45 degree angle. It was awesome.

One time we decided to check out the woods across the street from our house. About two hundred yards into our adventure we discovered a huge tree in the shape of a “V” surrounded by a short wooden fence. The tree was growing out of two marked graves from the early 1800’s and the headstones had wedged themselves into the tree’s trunk forever intertwining. Upon closer inspection we found that the graves were of a pair 8-year-old twin girls who had died of pneumonia one winter long ago. Most likely homesteaders or prospectors kids. It was kinda cool to think that the tree itself was the kids in some way because it grew from the dirt that they had turned to dust in.

Kinda cool but kinda creepy!

The summer turned to Fall and in Yosemite that really didn’t mean much to us as most of the trees were evergreens. We continued our fun and went swimming in the cool rivers near our house well into what was cold-as-crap weather back home.

December 22 I had a plan to go back to Jersey for the first time since I had left for Christmas and I packed my little bag and put it by the door so I could drive down to the airport the next morning. That night we got 2 feet of snow and I couldn’t open the damn door far enough to even get out!
Eventually with Harry’s help we got out and I was soon on my way ‘home’ for Christmas.

When I came back a week later, Harry was half frozen to death because he had discovered there was no heat in the house!

No heat and it was -5 outside.

Harry was all bundled up like the Michelin Man wearing four pairs of clothes at a time! I walked into the house and there was frost on the inside of the windows and the carpet crunched as I walked on it because it was frosty as well. Poor Harry had spent a week in a Winter Wonder Hell!

Trying to alleviate the problem at hand I called around town to get some wood delivered for the huge fireplace but there was none to be had. Intelligent people had bought ALL of it up during the summer preparing for the coming winter.

We were going to freeze to death!

It snowed so much this Pine flopped sideways!

I could not help but bring back thoughts of those twin children who had died of pneumonia so many years ago. Would I end up like a frozen Mikey?
That winter I burned all of my books, art, animation drawings and even some of the furniture in the house. (It was furnished when we got there, not so much when we left)
We cut down green trees and tried to burn them which only smoked up the entire house driving us back out into the cold so we could breathe. We held as many parties as we could so the house would heat up for the night (which worked pretty well most times).

But on those cold wintry nights when it snowed so hard no one would drive up the slippery road to our house and we froze.

Man we froze!

My grandmother and mother had made me a double quilt a few years before for my birthday and I have to tell you there is nothing on this earth at that time that I cherished as much as my double quilt.

Work was good, in fact we (Sierra) were in some ways revolutionizing modern gaming by animating directly on paper then scanning the art in so that others could color it. It was the end of pixel art in games.

During that year I worked on a few classic games:

Leisure Suit Larry ( who I redesigned to the way he looks today in fact. Check out those hands. Harry will tell you those are “Milo” hands for sure!),
Space Quest, Kings Quest and a few other small games as well.
I also got the bug for computers which was to be something I still have yet to shake :-)

And yet each night as Harry and I went home to that dark little house on the top of the mountain it was so frickin’ cold my hands would get numb even under the covers sometimes.

Harry had a few ‘ghostly’ encounters there with a prospector as well which I’ll leave for another tale.

In hindsight, it was a weird creepy mountain and we were the only one’s on it. Oh sure there were other houses on the mountain but they were deserted and we soon found out why.

Apparently the homes on the mountain were ’summer homes’!

They weren’t meant to be lived in during the winter and had no heaters and no insulation!

Upon asking the landlord WTF was up with that and why she gave us a lease on a summer home in the winter she shrugged and told us we could move if we wanted but that there was nothing available in town at the moment. Thanks Cruella.
This is me circa 1990 holding Zaptoons the cat.
Notice that I have a splint on my hand from a skirmish
with a local dillhole the night before.
Clearly he didn’t speak Jersey as I was just being nice.

Yes, we were stupid kids and did not know better and we almost died as a result of it too! Like I said earlier we got her back by burning the furniture. It was an even trade in my book. LOL!

Little by little we saw evidence of Spring as Winter released it’s icy grip on our little mountain and we were truly grateful. June 20th we had no snow on the ground and it looked like the freezing days were over for us.

As fate would have it I got a call from Warner Bros. about a portfolio I had sent them while looking for freelance and they wanted to hire me full time to work on the new TV show Tazmania! I packed my bags and headed out to L.A. July 4th, 1991

But that’s another story…