The QUAKE Project

Throughout June, I was working tirelessly on a new film called This Shit's for the Birds. Aesthetically, it was a bit of a throwback to some animation work I was doing in the late 2000s, and it got me curious about trying to create some illustrations using the same general techniques. It's a very geometric and, I guess, in many ways, basic style. Having only recently completed Quake for the first time—and very much enjoying it—I thought its cast of enemies would be the perfect subject to experiment with.

Quake itself is truly the mixed nuts of early 3D FPS games, so incoherent in tone, theming, and level design that it somehow becomes cohesive in its own strange way. I've never played anything else that looks, feels, or sounds like the original Quake, and I doubt there ever will be anything quite like it again. A masterpiece born from its completely unique development circumstances. I absolutely loved it.

My original plan was to make these illustrations fit into something very similar to the instruction manual for the Nintendo 64 port of Quake, but in the end I settled on creating a series of clean character cards instead.