Book Review: Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons

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.

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This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook or visit their website.

Art of Midway: Before Pixels and Polygons is also available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | JP)

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This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook or visit their website.