I B Nelson

Existing LCD technology wasn’t the problem in the Pocket Arcade Equation, as millions of calculators, digital watches, and Game boys can attest.
The real trick was in translating those lively full-color characters found in the computer driven games down to fine lined, black-and-white replicas that retained the essence of the original. That’s how I.B. “Bill” Nelson Cartoonist, graphic artist, painter, commercial gardener, surfer-got his big  push out of paper art and number two pencils and into the world of computers.
Nelson needed work and he figured a cartoonist could do story boards. He started phoning.  “It took 40 or 50 calls to get the guy “, Nelson   says,”because he was always flying back and forth to Japan.”
The “guy” was Steve Bech of Bech Tech, a subcontractor hired by Sega to help make the Pocket Arcade concept a reality. Eventually, Nelson and  Bech connected, and Nelson was hired to work on the layout in  the first phase of the project.
At the time, Nelson didn’t know Adobe Illustrator  from mud bricks. But he had happened upon an employer who, as Bech explains, “brought over seven or eight paper artist to computers. Some fight. Most never go back.”
I.B. Nelson had seen it at work in his life before. Take, for intance, the time a year earlier that a friend of Nelson’s sat down next to a man in Bay Area Rapid Transit train and asked what all those paper were.
The man explained that he was about to publish a book on surfer language and was choosing illustrator and the friend introduced herself as how she knew I.B. Nelson and that I.B. was both an illustrator and a surfer.
Which is how Nelson ended up in the book. Such strokes of serendipity, plus being ready when opportunity knocked, had led Nelson to a semi-succesful career as a   cartoonist, his work was even distributed by King Features Syndicate.