prosthetic knowledge

Tracing The Influence: Stolen Images In Games 

Hardcore Gaming 101 have put together a five-part examination of pop culture influence / blatant rip-offs featured in vintage video game graphics and box art. Schwarzenegger and Stallone have an entire section devoted to them alone.

Imagine you’re a game producer in the late 1980s, a week before the deadline and you still haven’t got a cover for your game. Exhausted from crunchtime, you tell your illustrator to just rip off some Schwarzenegger action movie to get the job done. Careful, your subordinate might take the order all too literally! When artwork in video games seems to look too realistic to be actually drawn by the artist, then it actually might be too realistic, as many vintage games have stolen images from movies, album covers, paintings and even other games. The subject here aren’t simply inspired designs or characters (in that case, we’d be here all day just counting the games influenced by Nausicaä, Hokuto no Ken or Alien), but actual specific images that might have been traced, digitized or just used as direct reference. This first page is reserved for print material that goes with a game release (covers, flyers, manuals, etc.), while on the next page we’ll be diving into the games themselves. Some of these are well known, others more obscure, but they all have something in common: They would likely have gotten their artists sued if the original images’ copyright holders had ever seen them; a gallery of litigations that could have been, so to speak.

I never knew the horror game Silent Hill’s school was clearly referencing Kindergarten cop (although I didn’t see the StreetFighter II M. Byson / Balrog story there …)

Pattern recognition education and entertainment can be found at Hardcore Gaming 101 here

RIP - Jean Giraud aka Moebius

Sad to hear that the unique and talented French comic artist Moebius has passed away. As well as producing his own work, he had done some concept work for film projects such as Dune (the unmade Jodorowsky version), Alien, and Blade Runner (which itself was inspired by Moebius’ comic ‘The Long Tomorrow’, which you can see at The Bronze Age of Blogs:

Back in 1976, Jean Giraud was working on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ill-fated production of Dune, supplying concepts and designs.
One of the people in charge of special effects for the movie was Dan O’Bannon, who wrote Alien, Blue Thunder & Return Of The Living Dead, but who fans of a certain age will always remember as whiny astronaut Pinback in his & John Carpenter’s sci-fi black comedy Dark Star.
Both men were sitting around Paris for months, with basically nothing to do, while the film shuddered to a slow halt around them, so O’Bannon started drawing comics.
One of the comic strips he drew was a futuristic detective story called The Long Tomorrow. Moebius loved it, and immediately drew his own version, which was eventually published in Heavy Metal.
A few years later, O’Bannon was working on Alien, and asked Moebius to come in and do some more design work. He met with director Ridley Scott, who later asked him to work on Blade Runner, but Giraud regrettably had to pass as he was already working on an animated feature called The Time Masters ( which I recommend if you ever get the chance to see it )

Worth checking out if you have a spare hour is the BBC4 documentary ‘In Search of Moebius’ - split into three parts and embedded below:

In Search of Moebius - Jean Giraud clip1/3 by foivosloxias

In Search of Moebius - Jean Giraud _clip2/3 by foivosloxias

In Search of Moebius - Jean Giraud_clip3/3 by foivosloxias

You can see a lot more of the late artist’s work at the Tumblr blog The Airtight Garage

Japonism, or Japonisme, the original French term, which is also used in English, is a term for the influence of the arts of Japan on those of the West. The word was first used by Jules Claretie in his book L’Art Francais en 1872 published in that year.^[1] Works arising from the direct transfer of principles of Japanese art on Western, especially by French artists, are called japonesque. (from Wikipedia)

A blog on Japonisme I discovered today here: http://lotusgreenfotos.blogspot.com/

Marian Bantjes: Influence Map

via datavis: