Monday, December 18, 2006

VIDEO GAME GRAVEYARD Pt1





I was just going through my old hard-drive and tidying up some things, and stumbled across my portfolio of CG work. There's a ton of it, from 12 years working as a computer games artist.

The last three or four years I worked mainly in designing and rapid-prototyping game proposals. It was a small team, me and a shit-hot programmer...and our job, well...it doesn't get much better than this really, our job was to think up really cool ideas for games, and speedily produce a quick, vaguely playable sample of it. That would then be taken to a big game publisher and we'd pitch the idea to them.

So I thought, it might be interesting to any readers out there who do partake in a little gaming to see images of some games that oh-so-nearly went into full production, but for the decision of a corporate bean-counter...and who knows, might just have gone on to become a huge hit, another Tomb Raider, another Rome TW, another Halo.

These three images were from a proposal based on the movie WestWorld. You know the movie, right? Yul Brynner as a robot gunslinger whose circuits are fried by a malfunction in a robot theme park. etc etc. We designed a game where you play a maintenance bod, armed with some gadgetry, whose task it was, was to rescue theme park guests, whilst fighting all manner of robotic foes; gunslingers, knights, orc, dragons, aliens. We had some cool zones like 'Horror Zone' and 'History Zone' and 'Movie Zone' (movie zone was cool, because there'd be loads of vaguely recogniseable cameos...eg: Laurel and Hardy robots).

Anyway, I hastily knocked up a some damaged gunslinger robots, some maintenance bunkers and drafted in some extra artists to throw together a wild west street and my programmer partner wrote enough code that you could wander around have a simple gun fight with them....and quite a cool gimmick of the game - target a robot and directly control it, for a limited time.

We pitched it, and this one, nearly....oh so nearly got greenlighted.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Westworld was a cool film, maybe a little old for some of the young gamers though.

the stills look great!

Anonymous said...

nice!

Are the rendered still frames or game play shots? if they are game play shots, the rendering is very good and slick for the time you did them!

Alex Scarrow said...

yes, in game shots. It was the same 3d engine that we wrote for The Thing. I'd guess this was about 6-7 years ago now.

Anonymous said...

looks just a good, as some of today's games. cant comment on speed and fluidity etc etc but the stills look great all the same.

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