videogames

videogame concepts & artwork
eterna, atari corp, activision inc, neversoft entertainment, taniko llc, invasiv studios.

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2003/2004 – traceur, xbox – invasiv studios
art direction, game design, co-founder and chief creative officer

in late 2002, my wife, a business partner and i took the risky decision of starting a self-funded next gen games studio in new york city. one of the most obvious challenges that we faced was to find talents in a city that had really limited tights with the videogame world. but this was also one of our biggest strengths; to break the industry’s mold and do something unusual in one of the largest, most exciting cities in the world – if you do it they will come – and indeed a few did come.

with very limited resources and an eight people development team, we were able to build a solid prototype based on the urban sport/art parkour. the concept of the game was really innovative and ambitious at the time, and we received great feedback from most of the publishers we approached. but the challenge was too great and the commitment unfortunately too little, the funding never came in even tho we tried our hardest, and eventually had to close the studio a year after opening its doors.

regardless, this was a tremendous life and professional lesson. may be we were foolish and not fully prepared, but i prefer to think that we were simply too early to try to accomplish this as the console market wasn’t yet ready to support ventures like ours.

traceur would make a hell of a game today!

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2001/2002 – gba prototypes and game – taniko
art director, co-founder

taniko was my first attempt at being involved in running a game studio, telecommuting from new york. it quickly became clear that the company's long term vision and creative direction wasn’t the right fit for me, so i called it quit six months after helping build many prototypes, shaping the studio's identity and art directing one gba game.

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2000/2001 – tony hawk’s pro skater 3, ps2 – neversoft
lead artist and art direction (downgraded to additional art)

thps3... things were becoming really tedious and uninspiring at this point, like a big production factory house. it was much of the same everyday even tho the platform was next gen, learning the ps2 dev kit tools, making bump maps and high-res 3d models.

instead of playing it safe and just create pretty visuals for the thps series, i always did a lot more since i started working at neversoft in terms of my involvement with the different projects, using the graphic engine to its full potential, experimenting and discovering new breakthrough techniques, constantly striving to innovate on the production side and bringing in outside talents such as authentic l.a. graffiti artists and famous rock bands like suicidal tendencies, among other things. for this 3rd installment of thps, sheppard fairey (who was still unknown by most of the mainstream audience) accepted to let me use his obey artwork in the game. activision’s legal department had it removed shortly after i left the project. nokia and mountain dew billboards were ok, but not obey stickers, even tho sheppard had agreed via email to let us use his work. these kind of incidents would help solidify my feelings about the current state of the gaming industry.

my wife was the first employee at this small blown up lifestyle magazine called tokion, and they wanted to move to new york in order to grow. i finished making the canada level for thps3, packed my stuff and then crossed the country with them to new york. it was a drastic change from my daily production mode and a lot more exciting, inspiring and important for my wife's career and our life than to follow an easy but shallow and not so challenging videogame franchise development routine.

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1999/2000 – tony hawk’s pro skater 2, psx – neversoft
lead artist and art direction

thps2 was a breeze. neversoft was growing and expending rapidly, activision bought them, and i was sold as part of the package as one of their seven best employees. couldn’t complain… but it also meant that we would be making a lot more skateboarding games for the years to come.

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1998/1999 – tony hawk’s pro skater, psx – neversoft
lead artist and art direction

at neversoft's studio, there was this swedish programmer always working by himself on a secret game engine, the door to his office often shut. it turned out to be a prototype for a skaterboarding game, a brand new mechanic that could have had a lot of potential if done right.

after wrapping up apocalypse, i was given the option to choose between a fishing game project and that skateboarding thing (at the time it was just a bruce willis stick figure on a board going downhill…). i choose the stick on a board as fishes and water weren’t really inspiring. afterall, i was a skate fanatic as a kid and the punk rock culture surrounding it has always attracted me.

i was one of the first people on the project, long before tony hawk and other skate pros got involved, and produced tones of character and level design sketches in a short period of time. soon after i was offered the position of lead artist, developing the visual style of the game, its identity, and leading the environment art team while working closely with the level designers and producer. it was a great project to work on with a neat street culture vibe, and for some reason easy to develop in less than a year. i still believe that this was the most solid team of developers i ever got the chance to work with.

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1998 – apocalypse, psx – neversoft
digital art

in june of 98, activision put me in contact with a small developer in the los angeles valley called neversoft, and i liked their vibe right away. they were wrapping up a 3d shooter called apocalypse, co-starring bruce willis. this large scale project had been previously developed by an internal activision team but turned out to be a distaster, and to save its production cost they passed it on to neversoft who had a more solid game engine in hand. time was really tight to redo the game and they needed help at the end of production to wrap it up. in less than a month i learned all the tools of the graphic engine and the development process, enhanced some of the game’s artwork and delivered new assets that i guess impressed the right people.

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1998 - civilization: call to power, pc – activision
conceptual and digital art

as activision was restructuring its internal development studio, i was temporarily put on this project for two months where i conceptualized and designed all the cities for the game.
different and interesting.

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1996/1998 - pitfall 3d: beyond the jungle, psx - activision
conceptual and digital art, assistant art director

in march of 1996, i was lucky enough to join early on the talented development team of the latest installment of activision’s biggest franchise from the 80’s - pitfall!

this exciting title was being developed for the best gaming platform out there - the sony playstation, and it had the most interesting setup for me at the time; organic and gloomy environments, ruined architectures of past civilizations, fantastic creatures, and a “raiders of the lost ark” feel. my contribution to the project was to work closely with the art director and game designers to define a unique visual style, conceptualize the different environments, create original game mechanics, enemies, and come up with an updated look for pitfall harry. aside from this, i also created over 50% of the game’s texture artwork for the levels and characters, and art directed the two last levels of the game.

pitfall 3d was by far the most interesting and challenging project i ever worked on, learning tremendously about artistic direction, hardware limitations, team work, and defining/solidifying my visual style for future projects to come.

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1996 – mechwarrior 2, pc – activision
texture artist

while in paris, unsure about my next career move, activision contacted me as they were seeking new talents in order to rebuild their development studio and revive the company’s brand.
i was flown to los angeles for an interview and almost didn’t get hired as my english was really limited (and my graphic style too french apparently), but my previous experience at atari as a texture artist i guess made me a rare expert in this field at the time, which was critical for an enhanced 3d graphic card version of activision’s current best selling game - mechwarrior 2.

i wasn’t familiar with this game at all as giant mechs aren’t really my thing, but after a two months test period of hard dedicated labor and long cubical nights, activision's management decided that i was worth keeping around.

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1995 – fight for life, atari jaguar – atari
conceptual and texture artist

after years of struggles as an independent graphic novelist, illustrator, painter, graphic designer and conceptual tattoo artist, i had the incredible opportunity to travel to the united states to the silicon valley and work for the legendary atari corporation, finally making a decent living through my passion for videogames. a dream come true!

atari had financial difficulties at the time, and they were trying to develop a ground breaking 3d fighting game for their struggling gaming system - the jaguar. inspired by the famous virtua fighter from sega and the still unknown toshiden from sony, fight for life was the first north american 3d console game ever and was hoping to boost the jaguar's unit sells up. developed only by one coder (my old friend from eterna in france) and a young 3d modeler/animator, i jumped in six months into the project and was exposed for the first time to uv mapping and 3d modeling. i felt quite comfortable creating textures for the very low poly 3d fighters, as well as cut-scene sketches, character design and ui artwork. i did what i could and drastically improved the general look, but unfortunately atari went bankrupt a few months before the game shipped and i had to move back to france after going through some pretty interesting misadventures.

years later, fight for life was voted one of the worst games ever by psm magazine. i’m kind of proud to have this under my belt, but i know that the game was a technical brilliance really advanced for its time. it just couldn't deliver what it promised.

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1990/1991 - blaston & cartoon line, amiga/arcades/archimedes - eterna
conceptual and bitmap artist, 2d animator, game designer

from 1987 to 1990, i was living in a small town in the south of france, going to art school after dropping out of the regular school system, playing too much computer games and being involved in the amiga500/atari st demo scene. creating bitmap images and animations on my amiga was one of my favorite past time, immersing myself in these virtual imaginary worlds, combining my passion for cinema, storytelling, role playing, fantasy, animation and graphic novels together in one visual and interactive medium - the birth of the digital era.

one day as i was cruising the minitel (the french ancestor of the internet) in search of more cracked games and demo work, i met a person in a chat room looking for a bitmap artist to join his small computer games startup, eterna. only two people were part of it, both very imaginative and enthusiastic programmers, and i jumped at the opportunity right away. this is how i started my early career in the videogame world. i left art school shortly after and went for my first ride in the gaming business with these two coders.

in less than a year, we developed two 8-bit titles where i was in charge of all of the art assets, level designs and gameplay mechanics, doing it for free or for very little money. it was a good time, but difficult, and the startup eventually closed doors as we couldn’t financially break even.

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