When I was a teenager, I played a lot of video games. The early 2000s saw extremely rapid development in media technology, not least in the world of entertainment. We got to experience a wild progression from the 2d, pixellated world of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000) on the PC to the detailed 3d world of Halo: Combat Evolved on the first Xbox (2001), Hideo Kojima’s stealth masterpiece Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001 on the PS2), an incredibly ambitious first-person shooter Command & Conquer: Renegade (2002) on the PC (a game that was way ahead of its time), onward to the (for the time) stunning 3d graphics of Halo 2 (2004) also on the original Xbox. Do not even get me started on a certain massively multiplayer online game called "World of Warcraft" that launched shortly thereafter (a game which is still played by thousands of people today in its original version over 20 years later). When one is young, stuck in a suburban house with nowhere to go, with nothing on television, in the middle of winter, and with no other activities, what else would one do than seek an outlet to other worlds?
Video games still tend to have a poor reputation as a waste of time, even though there are a lot of other ways in which people are just as unproductive which do not seem to hold the same stigma. I slowly began to lose interest in video games myself when I began to study in 2010, and gradually I drifted towards other activities: sports, reading, and later academics and design. Not all video games are equal, but at their best they are another medium for artistic expression. The video games that leave a lasting impression become a type of interactive film, where there is an immersive world to experience and a meaningful story. The art of many video games is absolutely amazing, and can be a stunning expression of creativity. I often think about how fun it is to create a world and rich environments without the need to take into consideration real-world budgets, building codes or the details of building physics (laughs). Here the most important aspect becomes the character of the surroundings, the emotions they evoke, and not least how the environment supports the characters and the story.
Recently I revisited one of my favourite real-time strategy games from one of my favourite series: Command & Conquer 3 on the PC from 2007. I have been doing some sketches of some of the structures that you can build. At the time I never really looked at any of these structures in detail, and I played this game well before I found my interest for art. Most of its quality went over my head at the time, but after returning to it many years later I find that I am able to appreciate better the fantastic detail that was put into the creation of these structures.
GDI (Global Defence Initiative) structures: power plant and Tiberium refinery
Brotherhood of Nod structures: power plant and the iconic Hand of Nod (produces infantry)
More GDI structures - weapons factory and tech centre
Scrin structures and units: Drone platform, tiberium refinery, annihilator tripod, tiberium harvester, shock trooper
My favourite unit that you can build in the game: the Redeemer, the Nod hero unit! Imagine how terrifying it would be to see this in the streets.
Since I first played the Command and Conquer games in the early 2000s I have worked occasionally with environment concept art for the video game industry, and I always appreciate the opportunity to take part in the design of virtual worlds as an exercise in pure creativity and environmental design. The disadvantage with this kind of work I suppose is that the structures and environments that you create will only ever exist virtually on a screen, and it is first and foremost for this reason that I am glad that I also work with architecture and landscape design where (at least in theory) you can contribute to build environments that will have a tangible impact on people in the real world that we share. The virtual nature of this art does though not necessarily diminish its value. I find that I am still deeply inspired by all of the environments that I experienced through playing video games when I was younger, not to mention the massive number of virtual environments from various films that have had a similarly large impact on me as a person (here I think immediately of the bath house in Studio Ghibli's "Spirited Away", but that is a story for another day). I will probably always retain somewhere in my mind fragments of the various images that were put into my head from my time as a gamer, especially my interest for building worlds and creating memorable experiences at interesting places.