Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons

by Stephan Martinière, Stephan Martinière, Scott Robertson (Editor)

Midway Games is a leading designer and publisher of interactive video. This publication is a survey of the best work by concept designers commissioned by the company.

Genres: Art

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2007

About the author

Stephan Martinière is an award-winning French science fiction and fantasy artist, using his considerable skill and experience to morph from cartoonist, to concept illustrator, to art director.

As of 2008, Stephan Martiniere resides in Dallas, Texas and works at id Software on Rage.

* Complete list of his book covers.

Book covers were something that Stephan wanted to do for many years: “As a kid I was buying sci-fi books mainly because of the cover art. I was a huge fan of Chris Foss.” His first cover was for a story from Jack Williamson, 'Terraforming the Earth'.
“Doing book covers is one of the most enjoyable and rewarding thing for me”, says Stephan. “As an artist, book covers offer individual recognition. Coming from a background in movies and animation where everything is part of a huge machine, you have no idea where your work goes and how it’s being used. It’s rare when you can see it all on the screen. As an artist it’s important to be able to show people what you do and receive feedback. It validates your art and yourself as an artist. Book covers are exciting because they are “undiluted”.
CGSociety, Grand Master Award interview.

Reviews

[Parka · Rating 4 out of 5]

(More pictures at parkablogs.com)

Here's the art book for the game studio Midway Games, which unfortunately went bankrupt in 2009 and was bought over by Warner Bros. The book's published in 2007.

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.