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.