ABOUT PETE MCLENNON

For more than 33 years, I've built a career around transforming ideas into engaging visual experiences. What began as a passion for drawing has grown into a multidisciplinary career spanning concept art, illustration, game design, visual development, and creative leadership across the video game, toy, educational, and entertainment industries.

Throughout that journey, I've had the opportunity to contribute to hundreds of commercial projects ranging from AAA games and licensed entertainment properties to original intellectual properties and children's products. My work has taken me from designing realistic military vehicles and immersive science-fiction worlds to creating stylized characters, fantasy settings, educational experiences, and family-focused entertainment. Everything from Dora the Explorer to Mortal Kombat.

A couple core strengths I've developed over the years are versatility and adaptability. Every project presents a different creative challenge, and I enjoy learning new tools, embracing new styles (I've been called an "art chameleon"), and collaborating with talented teams to find the right visual and design solutions. Whether the goal is developing a new game mechanic, defining the visual direction of a product, or helping shape a brand from its earliest concepts, I enjoy contributing wherever my experience can have the greatest impact.

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...YEAH, BUT WHO IS PETE MCLENNON REALLY?

If you're here and reading this, chances are you already know me or are related to me, but for those strangers who manage to stumble their way to this random spot on the internet, here is a synopsis of "Pete" awkwardly written in the third person.

Minus aliens or psychic powers, Pete lived out the typical Speilbergian suburban childhood of your average slightly feral, free roaming, unsupervised, self-reliant Gen X kid. Raised on a steady diet of Saturday Morning Cartoons, comic books, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, 80's movies, Dungeons & Dragons, Atari, arcades and unfettered exploration of the world around him on his firebird branded bicycle, Pete thrived as a proper nerd. He largely lived in the fantasies of his own head, which led to an outward expression of bringing those thoughts and imaginings to life by drawing everything in cheap scribble pads (and Susan Striker's Anti-Coloring Books, which Pete highly recommends getting for any creative minded child to encourage their imaginations!), and later in fancy sketchbooks, and then in Zines, and even later in Photoshop. Pete had aspirations of becoming a comic book artist...even with the understanding it would most likely mean he would also be a starving artist, which was fine with him as long as he was steeped in doing what he loved, but fate had a different plan, and while in college and attending comic book, sci-fi and fantasy conventions at the beginning of the 90's, he tripped his way into making video games and has never looked back.

 

Here we are decades later, and Pete has retained most of his childhood passions and grown into a mostly socially acceptable adult nerd. He is an avid gamer (encompassing video games, table top games, and RPGs), still collects comic books, listens to a schizophrenic spectrum of music, admits to having a "stuff" collecting problem enhanced by a grown up income,  and still willingly loses himself in television and movies. Time and time again, Pete has thrilled at getting to participate in getting to create things with and for all the same kinds of entertainment that he so avidly consumed and lost himself in growing up, and Pete still loves doing what he does for a living.

Pete lives in Chicago, Illinois, and has two sons that he is endlessly proud of and are thankfully cooler than he ever was.

 

THE HISTORY OF MY IMAGINARY ART STUDIO

My Imaginary Art Studio started as an idea in the art space I created in my grandmother's basement in the mid 80's. I had lofty dreams of assembling an artistic collective of diversely talented people to work on a wide variety of creative endeavors. It was a 13 year old's understanding of a business model, like an unholy mash up of communal hippie idealism and optimistically romanticized capitalism. But what the heck, I was a kid and didn't know anything about how businesses worked. It was just a pipe dream, hence the "IMAGINARY" part of the name, yet I held on to the idea of my fictional little art studio right into adulthood. I eventually did start doing art professionally, and when it came to doing personal contract work for people, I had the bright idea of working under the banner of My Imaginary Art Studio. It may not have been the utopian artistic community I had originally imagined, but I still felt a certain sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in legitimizing My Imaginary Art Studio as a valid enterprise. Unfortunately, I didn't think to factor in the IRS also recognizing my vision as a legitimate business. Thousands of dollars in unreported tax fines later I gave up on the idea of My Imaginary Art Studio being a real world entity, but I still feel a tiny bit of pride knowing that even if just for a short moment in time, that little artist kid's idea for a company came true and was officially recognized by the U.S. government. It may have cost me more than it ever made in the first place, but dreams really can come true!

 

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: Why does your site look like a World of Tanks website?

A: Well, The homepage specifically highlights what I've been working on most recently and any of my work related news. For the last few years I've worked for Wargaming almost exclusively on World of Tanks: Modern Armor, so that is most of what will appear at the forefront of my website until I do something else.

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Q: I have a question about LEGO Racers, (insert question here)?

A: Out of all the games I've worked on, LEGO Racers seems to have resonated the most with people and stuck in their memories. I've been approached with more questions about the game and the making of it than any other. Because of this, I have started a special page on this site dedicated to answering those questions, and posting old designs, drawings and other materials from my filing cabinet stash as I scan them. You can check out all of my LEGO information shared in one place on the LEGO Racers Retrospective page under the ABOUT tab, or if you have questions, you can ask them through the CONTACT form.