The man who also worked as a consultant on the 2016 DOOM reboot and Fallout 4, and whose two promising projects in the second half of the 2000s fell through in the second half of the year.

Viktor Antonov’s art style was a major influence on Half-Life 2 and Dishonored. The artist has worked on dozens of films and video games, and his beginnings can be traced back to Kingpin and Redneck Rampage, as he began his career in the gaming industry at Xatrix Entertainment (aka Gray Matter). He went on to serve as art director for Valve’s legendary Half-Life 2. He created the iconic style of Combine and City 17: combining a city-sized prison with 20th century Eastern Bloc architecture (he grew up in it, Antonov was Bulgarian!), Combine’s otherworldly style was a great and bizarre combination.

Dishonored’s Dunwall drew on similar ideas. Distinctive bluesy, alien metallic style during an expanding industrial revolution. Here we didn’t get a post-Soviet style, but rather a 19th century London and Edinburgh inspired Antonov. And how successful it was: if there’s one thing we remember for sure, it’s the art direction of Dishonored! It’s unique, that’s for sure.

In the NoClip documentary celebrating Half-Life 2’s 20th birthday, Antonov explains how he collected reference images of Paris’ Austerlitz train station to create the groundbreaking first part of Half-Life 2: “I’ve always done a little bit of urban exploration since I was a kid. So I love to break through a window of an abandoned factory or building or train station. It’s one of my hobbies, or it used to be. What’s on top of buildings? What’s in the basement of an abandoned building? And a factory? We did a lot of work on that,” Antonov said.

Two other projects by Antonov stand out. The Crossing, announced in January 2007, which would have combined single-player and multiplayer elements as two Parisias merged (one a modern French capital, the other an alternative where the Templars would have seized the French crown), and LMNO, conceived with Steven Spielberg, could have been revolutionary. The former was worked on by Arkane, the latter by Electronic Arts Los Angeles and Arkane. Neither came to fruition.

Antonov left us at the age of 52. God rest his soul.

Source: PCGamer