Concept artist Wayne Barlowe on 'Dante's Inferno', Hell and video games

Concept artist Wayne Barlowe, whose credits include the Hellboy films and Avatar, collaborated with the Dante's Inferno team at Visceral Games on the creation of their new video game version of Hell. Barlowe talked with Game Hunters about the process and his own previous experience with the underworld.

You've worked in many mediums. How would you describe the work you did for the video game Dante's Inferno?
My approach is always that of a designer looking to be as original as I possibly can. In both film and games, the three-dimensional aspect of design is always preeminent so I would say there was a lot of similarity. The chief difference, of course, being the interactivity of the gamer rather than a more sedate onlooker in film.

How does that interactive element affect your designs?
I'm a big gamer, so for me I do want characters I play with to look good from all angles and to be exciting-looking. In film, I guess the same consideration is there but here I do find myself, if I am playing a third-person game and I have a free floating camera, there are times that I pause and look at the character a little more closely to make it form in ways obviously you can't do in the film. Again it isn't too dissimilar when you are at the stage I was brought in (on Dante's Inferno) and at the stage I'm most often brought in on a film. My expectation was that pretty much anything I wanted to put on paper would be achievable, particularly in an atmospheric sense. I think we are at a stage here where we have crossed a threshold with games that does really resemble film a lot.

Would you talk a bit about your large body of work dealing wit Hell?
I've done two art books on Hell with 40 to 50 paintings and a lot of drawings. That was Barlowe's Inferno and Brushfire and then the novel derived from those paintings had its origin as a screenplay that I wrote and sold to Fox Animation. After I got it back in turnaround because they folded up shop, a lot of people were asking me if I was going to rework the script or go back into it or anything and I decided to write the novel (God's Demon). My Hell, in direct contrast to Dante's Inferno, both the game and the written (work), is more derived from the John Milton, Paradise Lost, 16th century set of ideas and values, whereas Dante, of course, is a 13th century medieval work. So my Hell deals more with fallen angels and the sort of overarching question of 'What would have happened after Paradise Lost?' and 'What would have happened to the fallen angels who had become demons in Hell?' Dante's Hell is a much more moralistic, almost satiric work that goes in a very different direction.

What is it about hell that is so interesting?
I think it is the same reason we like the villains in movies more than we like the guy who is the protagonist. They are more interesting. There is something that speaks to people about the darker side of things. Everybody is human, everybody is fallible. I believe Dante wrote his work as a cautionary thing for people around him at the time, as much as for generations afterwards. There are different parameters for the Milton tale. It's an overarching question of how something good can turn evil. I think these are all different shadings of the same thing.

What aspects of Charon and the circles of Gluttony and Lust did you try to bring forward in your drawings?
First and foremost, I did not want to dip into my own Hell and its personalized bag of tricks I had spent probably twenty years working up. I felt that Dante's world and universe was derived from a different time period. I tried hard with the design to not be anachronistic from that time period, to look backwards from that point and feel that anything was kind of fair game that had preceded Dante, but not things that had come after, of course. So from a visual aesthetic standpoint, I was trying to remain at least in theory faithful to Dante's vision itself. And the characters that I worked on I think reflect that to a degree. I was going for a different kind of organic look than the one I have layered into my own Hell.

As with film, my first obligation is to fulfill whatever the script has in it. After that I get to impose my own sort of aesthetic template on stuff. In this case, I am a history and archeology buff, so those kind of things were informing the designs up to a point and then my own sense of bizarre creativity was also being layered in.

What thoughts do you have about the experience that players will have with the game?
I played the demo and I was really impressed with many, many aspects of it. While I like many kinds of games, this is not actually my chosen type of game because I'm not terribly good at it. However, I played through the demo and enjoyed the heck out of it, or should say the hell out of it. Apart from the really great action and compelling characters, there was a richness to it that the team brought to the visuals that I found really compelling. It was not superficial in any way and it was atmospheric on a textual level. The density of stuff to just feast your eyes on was remarkable.

What can you tell us about your work on the films Avatar and The Hobbit?
I was floored by (Avatar). I saw bits and piece of it in L.A. before it came out and had been very preloaded on the show. I was there in '05 and did the damage that I did and off I went and wasn't what sure what I'd be seeing four years later. I am enormously proud and thrilled to have worked on that thing. It's an amazing achievement. I think in a lot of ways it will be looked upon unquestionably as a landmark film in terms of the technical achievement. It will open the door pretty much the way color did decades ago. (For The Hobbit) I've done a lot of things I can't talk about. The experience was amazing. (Director/writer) Guillermo (del Toro) is bringing his own sensibility to the franchise, which is very much in line, though, with what Peter Jackson had laid out in the other three movies. So I think it is going to have a visual richness that people are familiar with in Guillermo's movies (such as Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy).

How old were you when you started playing video games? I can't even remember. I did play a lot of Pong with my dad and then I remember being in New York playing Battle Tank. That was certainly an early thing.

Favorite game growing up? I played Dune 2000 until it was coming out of my ears. I started gravitating to PC strategy games for a while and then went over to consoles and had a Sega Genesis. Then I got a PlayStation and PlayStation 2 and worked my way to an Xbox. For my money, I love the Xbox and I have played a ton of games.

Favorite game now? I am partial to a number of games. Borderlands of late has been a lot of fun. I finished that. Mass Effect, I enjoyed that last year and just picked up Mass Effect 2. Assassin's Creed. It's compelling to me if it has a historical bent, that is great, and if it is visually stunning, then I am interested in that. I think Gears of War 1 and 2 were fun. That's a cross-section. I miss strategy games because the consoles don't seem to do them. Halo Wars was fun.

Game style? "Twitch or think?" Platforming games I'm not particularly good at. I remember laboring over the first Tomb Raider and being frustrated, but finished it. I was frustrated by invisible things I could jump to but didn't know about until I bought the strategy guide. Strategy games I like because again I'm a history buff. I like the idea of shoving armies against each other. I'm not a good twitch player.

A certain video game achievement you are proud of? Any game I finish I'm proud of.

"Last night I played ... ?"Assassin's Creed 2.

"I'm looking forward to playing ...?"Mass Effect 2.

For more information about Wayne Barlowe, go to his web site here.

By Mike Snider