Customer Reviews

Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Length:: 0:45 Mins

The gallery features art from some of the games they released, namely Gauntlet, Mortal Kombat, Psi-Ops, Stranglehold and Suffering.

Most of the art are of character/creature designs and background paintings. The concept art for the characters and costumes are beautiful. I love the environment paintings with the nice mood and atmosphere, and they have nice use of photo textures to provide a very textural feel, so there are some nice details. There aren't a lot of sketches.

Since 5 games are in this book, don't expect to see everything from every game. For example, not all the characters from Mortal Kombat are in. However, the visual variety is great.

I see that Stephan Martiniere was the Creative Visual Director at the studio at that time. There are some pieces from him which look quite different from his usual sci-fi fantasy pieces.

Other artists whose work are featured include Luis Mangubat, Pav Kovacik, Vince Proce, Angie Lai, Tony Goskie, Jung Park, Vance Kovaks, Ryan Meinerding, Roel Jovellanos, Todd Uyeminami, Ben Olson, Jason Merck, Sammy Hall, Stacey Clark, Tae young Choi and Bruni Werneck.

Nice book for the game artists.

(There are more pictures of the book on my blog. Just visit my Amazon profile for the link.)

I found there to be too much character & creature creation - aren't you glad we're all different? I really liked the landscape & environmental work - especially since the current push in video games is to make them more cinematic I see a need for vast improvement in landscapes & environments, needed by me to draw me into the game. And I really enjoyed the comments by the artists.

Lots of background for each individual painting is done by the artist who created the painting. They try to describe the mood, atmosphere, and feeling desired for each painting. Emphasis is given to environments and backgrounds, although there is a fair amount of character development and creature creation. Most paintings are finished work and not much preliminary work is shown.

I actually bought this book for my daughter, an art major looking for inspiration in game design. She is familiar with Stephan Martiniere, having sat in on a 2 day workshop taught by him in Pasasdena. Overall, she is very happy with the selection of artists and their works. The reason that I gave it 4 stars is that there a couple of artist's examples that she just didn't like.