The first piece of concept art that adorns the pages of “Massive Black: Volume 1” would make you believe it was for some kind of movie. The image has three people in a hot air balloon as one of them is mounted on a chain gun taking down dragon-like creatures. There’s also a polar bear in the balloon wearing body armor and witches flying past the balloon. After checking out the image, I see that this was concept art for an unreleased Activsion project.
There are countless games that have never seen the light of day, but when a game is pitched it does need a talented artist to give the concept a vision. The same goes for movies, TV shows and any number of products.
More after the break.
Massive Black is a collection of artist that work with all types of art styles. The company was founded in 2002 and have since worked on 210 projects and have created over 30,000 pieces of art for games, film, TV, advertising and much more. Massive Black also has a rooster as their mascot and if you don’t understand why I’m pointing that out, then your mind isn’t completely in the gutter.
For the first time, Massive Black has released a book containing over 700 pieces of artwork. The nearly 200 pages of art contain work for games such as Ride to Hell, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Iron Man, Dead Head Fred, Hell Gate: London, Area 51, Saboteur and several other games on top of all the original pieces of art from the Massive Black team.
Looking through a book like this just makes you wonder what could have been. It makes you wonder why the direction of the game was changed. Why something so gorgeous was dropped for something else.
One section of the book has several pieces of concept art from an unreleased project by Atari and Shiny. On the first page detailing this unreleased project, you see a normal butler and waitress. Turning the page brings a whole new story as the waitress seems to have been infected by some kind of virus or parasite. There are several human characters that have been infected by something, resulting in the people to look kind of William Birkin in his first G-Virus form (mutated arm with giant claws).
We have a thriving community full of artists, many of which that want to break into the industry. The book is definitely a must buy for anyone interested in the industry and just beautiful art in general. It’s currently going for $59.99 and with the overall quality here, I’m kind of surprised it’s so cheap. If you’re interested in more Massive Black related stuff, check out the official Web site, ConceptArt.org to find a community full of artists and check out more of Ballistic Publishing’s other art book offerings.
[Updated with link to Massive Black site and added more images to the gallery. Thanks, Suprore!]
