CGSociety :: Special Feature
15 January 2009, by Gemma White

Massive Black has helped 18 of the top 20 game publishers bring their game worlds to life through concept design, 3D modeling, illustration, animation, and intellectual property development. Over its six-year history its artists have worked on 210 projects, generating a staggering 30,000 pieces of concept art for games, film, television, graphic novels, toys, and advertising. For the first time, Massive Black is taking its fans behind the scenes to see a selection of never before seen art including three major game universes developed by the team. Jason Manley talks about Massive Black’s foray into print in partnership with Ballistic Publishing.

Massive Black: Volume 1
Massive Black: Volume 1 brings together more than 700 pieces of artwork by the Massive Black team from studios in North America and Asia. A foreword by Oddworld's Lorne Lanning provides an entertaining view of his dealings with Massive Black and his thoughts on what makes it such a unique artist-focused company, while Jason Manley (co-founder of Massive Black) recounts the formation of the company with partners Justin “Coro” Kaufman, and Chris Hatala. The book also features a full range of artwork created by Massive Black for different game titles including concept, game, and promotional art, and offers a real insight into its creative processes. Jason Manley is very proud of the high quality of artwork featured in Massive Black: Volume 1, and is excited to show off so much previously unreleased material: “We have a lot of work we want to share with people. Getting a book done is great for promotion, but we really just wanted to see our work all over the place, and the book is a great way to do that. There’s a great game coming out by Deep Silver called ‘Ride to Hell’ that has some of the best character work we’ve ever done. All of that work is unreleased. It’s exciting to be able to show this work from people like Wes Burke, Jason Chan and Coro Kaufman. Pretty much everybody at Massive Black is represented in something in the book.”

Massive game projects
Massive Black: Volume 1 shows how the personalities of game characters are developed and refined through several revisions of concept sketches. This process is best shown by Massive Black’s work on a newly released PSP game called ‘Dead Head Fred’, developed for Vicious Cycle and D3 Publishing. Manley explains, “You’ll see examples of what the project could have looked like and what it ended up becoming, and we’re really happy to be able to share that.” Other game projects featured in the book include: ‘Saboteur’, ‘Red Faction: Guerilla’, ‘Golden Axe: Beast Rider’, ‘Iron Man’, ‘Hellgate: London’, ‘Dragon Age: Origins’, ‘Maelstrom’, ‘Ride to Hell’, ‘Dead Head Fred’, and ‘Severity’. Manley explains, “Red Faction 3 was a great project we worked on for THQ, Inc. and Volition Inc. We did a whole bunch of work using Google SketchUp and Adobe Photoshop to create environments, vehicles and characters for the game. The book covers the whole range of characters, creatures, monsters, environments, animation, modeling, and texturing work that we’ve been doing over the past few years across many projects.”

Credit: 'Dragon Age: Origins' [c] 2008 BioWare.
All Rights Reserved.

Credit: 'BeeHive' [c] Massive Black Entertainment.

Massive Black Entertainment
Massive Black is also very happy to share—for the first time—the stunning results of their quest to develop Massive Black Entertainment’s own original game and film worlds. Massive Black: Volume 1 features finished concepts, dynamic sketches, storyboards and animation sequences from three of their innovative and exciting new intellectual properties: ‘MothHead & BeeHive’; ‘Transient’; and ‘Degenesis’.