Console multi-player action platformer. I was only involved in the pre-production phase.
Food Fight
Console: Midway Games West, Inc., 2001
This was an interesting project that ultimately went nowhere, but showed a lot of potential and I had a lot of fun sketching up scenarios from the script and mini-game proposals. It was to be a tie-in to a CG movie with licensing rights to use just about every classic brand name food mascot. The story was somewhat like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with a detective who enters a whole alternate supermarket world after hours and uncovers a conspiracy with food brands come to life.
In our game, we proposed various ways the detective moves around the supermarket to look for clues, interact with the brand name characters, pushing the story along to an ultimate showdown with the villain and his generic brand "X" army intent on taking over the shelves. Mini-games are sprinkled throughout to keep things lively.
The movie ran into trouble, so the game never got greenlit, and we never heard about it again ...or so I thought. It showed up direct to video 11 years later! It had big named actors, but it was just terrible. Oh, well.
Swing dancing, big band music, martinis & cigars, and the aesthetics of the 60's smashed together in late 90's and early 00's. These trends coincided with golf rising in popularity from Tiger Woods, who made it more accessible to a casual and younger mindset. We were responding with golf game ideas.
Assassins
Arcade: Acclaim Coin-Op Entertainment, Inc, 1997
Shooters were big in the arcades at this time. John Woo and Quentin Tarantino films were all the rage. 60's style was back. We responded with an idea for the first arcade head-to-head shooter, allowing multiple cabinets to be linked together. We also added additional action moves to the traditional duck-pedal (You could dash, strafe, jump, and tumble between barriers). Almost all objects in the environment were fully destructible. Between matches, you can upgrade your character skins with earned game currency.
Unshipped arcade game blending elements of king-of-the-hill, racing, Rampage, and fighters. Players battle each other up the sides of a structure in a race to the top while also fending off mutual NPC enemies and obstacles. Exploring all the possible character ideas was really, really fun.
Arcade: Time Warner Interactive/Atari Games Corp, 1994
The sequel to Primal Rage paired avatars to each creature. As with the original Primal Rage, character designs were turned into stop-motion puppets. I was involved through pre-production. The game made it as far as testing but did not get shipped.
Dinosaur-themed fighter (Arcade). The game was unique in employing the using stop motion animation by renowned late Hollywood special effects animator (and Flying Burrito Brothers band member and theme song writer for the original Gumby show!) Pete Kleinow. I was co-creator and art director, managing a staff on internal and external artists. The game was also notable in being called out, along with Mortal Kombat and the cd-rom game Night Trap by Senator Joe Lieberman, that spurred the creation of the ESRB system.
Arcade fighting game based on robots. The twist was that the character's head, torso, and leg sections (and their respective abilities) could be swapped and combined in any manner, creating many potential combinations of abilities against each other.
Misc Sketches
Random drawings over the years, some for game concepts, others personal projects.