Stahl Arms - Killzone, artwork by Guerrilla Games

Stahl Arms is part of the official Cook & Becker Killzone Collection. The digital artwork is made by the Dutch artist Jesse van Dijk at Guerrilla Games. The image won the Into the Pixel Award in 2011 and is now being shown at the video game museum in Rome. The artwork shows the distant basis of Jorhan Stahl from the game Killzone 3.

Stahl Arms is digitally created concept art and exclusively for sale as a museum-grade Certified Art Giclee™ in this limited edition of 12. The prints are hand-numbered and come with a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the studio and master printer.

Killzone is one of the most visually impressive video game series of the start of this century. The prizewinning and lauded franchise serves as a graphical and technical benchmark for Sony’s PlayStation consoles.

Killzone is about war. Aesthetically the video games are science-fiction interpretations of WWII. Although the series has gradually become more exotic with locations featuring green skies and blue-hued jungles. As can been seen in concept artworks such as Jungle 1 & The Massar Constant. Yet the game Killzone has always depicted a more raw and realistic version of science-fiction warfare than other big game series. Digital concept art such as Derelict and Phyrrus Nuked Visari have that somber palette and almost melancholic atmosphere associated with WWII and WWI. The uniforms and enemies are also based on those of the German, Russian and Allied forces of that era.
The concept art also calls to mind more recent conflicts. Collateral could almost be 9/11 news footage and battles are fought out over oil rigs in frozen arctic environments. An internal studio illustration such as Last of the Heroes evokes the archetypical image of the forgotten Vietnam war veteran.

Not uncommon for the top art teams in the video games industry is that a lot of the artists are formally trained industrial designers and architects. As is the case with Guerrilla Games. Players spend most their game time peering over the barrel of a gun so a large part of the story and context is provided via level, gun and vehicles design. All the while, players need to be effectively lead through levels and fictitious environments that still need to feel believable. Therefore professional designers with skills in these areas are vital and you can see that the concept art in itself already provides time, place and narrative for the viewer.

Game development is a wonderful cocktail of IT, art and design. It is a typical creative enterprise for the post-autonomous era in which we live, where art and entertainment can still be conceptualized by a single person or a handful of people but the actual production is done by a huge team of specialists and craftsmen. Sometimes over many years. The fact that Killzone has so consistently been developed and grown over some many years underwrites Guerrilla Games’s position as one of the leading game developers in Europe.

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