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The other day we told you about the artwork created specifically for an online version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game that was created for the new BBC editions of the Hitchhiker's radio drama that came out a few years ago. This image, featuring a cartoony version of the Vogon Captain's quarters, was part of a set created for the same game.
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Well, we'd be screwed for one thing. Plus it's doubtful that the chunks of the moon would remain identifiable and intact like they are in this piece of concept art... but it's still haunting and beautiful. It's strange to imagine something that's been hanging in the sky your whole life plummeting into your world, but that's exactly what's happened in "Moon Crash 1: Winter."
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After humans have colonized the solar system, a mysterious shard from space arrives, killing or warping everything around it — until our civilization is all but wiped out. Thousands of years later, the only humans left on Earth survive in five mega-cities or roam the post-apocalyptic wasteland in combative tribes. Black Sea Studios' upcoming "next gen" real-time strategy game, Worldshift, features cooperative gameplay, thousands of powerful artifacts, customizable factions and a twisted scifi setting. Check out this gallery of mind-blowing screenshots and weird concept art.
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If you haven't seen the BBC television version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then you need to get off your lazy duff and give it a whirl. It's extremely different from the movie version, and much closer to the novels and radio drama. Probably the best thing about it is the Guide itself, complete with amazing 2D animations depicting whatever the book is droning on about. Like the spaceship Heart of Gold, pictured here. Check out the glorious old school animation style that makes up the Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson Brain, which powers the Infinite Improbability Drive.
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What would have happened if Raiders of the Lost Ark met Sid and Marty Krotfft's Lost Saucer? It might have looked a little something like this. Of course, you might have a chance to see this scene for real if the rumors about extraterrestrials in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are to be believed.
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This is a Prostethetic Commando, a robot whose processor is a human brain taken from a felled soldier or police officer. Generally, the PC guards dignitaries at public functions. I didn't make that up — the artist behind this trippy bot, Keith Thompson, did. He's got an amazing gallery on his website, with each image containing enough backstory to build into your next game campaign, or your next movie.
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In some circles of the steampunk Star Wars universe this is known as the "Death Star," and it generates billions of calculations all day long in an effort to work with Arcane Mathematics and find a "Unified Force Theory" that can destroy entire planets.
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Once we finally have flying cars, authorities are going to have a bitch of a time keeping people from doing what these two hotshot pilots are planning: scaring the ever-living shit out of a pleasure boater. Granted, these are minijets with funky wings and not flying cars, but it makes you think about what might start happening in the skies once anyone can just flit around.
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The coolest thing about the cover artwork for Queen's 1977 album News of the World was that it was inspired by a cover from the October 1953 edition of Astounding Science Fiction magazine (later called Analog). The caption for the image was "Please... fix it, Daddy?"
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This looks like the poster for an awesome science fiction film that we'd like to see: a girl in a giant hulking exoskeletal suit of armor with her comic-effect tiny little robotic pal perched on her shoulder. You've got evil signified by the pouring lava on the left hand side of the background, while fighters triumphantly scream past a proud city on the right. Whatever is happening here, we want to know more.
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It's not clear if the two travelers in this concept art have crashed into this glowing cavern, or if that's simply their parking place. Maybe there's a swarm of flesh-peeling mites just out of view, but it looks like a good place for an adventure to us.
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This summer's animated robot superstar Wall-E threatens to squash us under his mammoth treads and obliterate us with his laser blast. In these new screens from the upcoming game to coincide with the film, the cuddly bot has whipped out some sort of a beam weapon and he's using it to destroy something just offscreen while a terrified Other-Bot cowers in the rafters above. Does cute little Wall-E have a vicious streak that we weren't aware of previously? Click through for more game screens, which showcase some key moments from the film and give more clues to Wall-E's unsuspected abilities.
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This concept art for Fallout 3, which we mentioned once before, shows Washington D.C. reduced to ashen rubble. The highly-anticipated sequel to the classic "wander the wasteland and have sex with mutant hookers" RPG is slated for a Fall 2008 multi-platform release. The story is not directly related to the one from Fallout 2, but it takes place in the same world. In 2077, nuclear war destroys most of America, forcing the survivors to hide out in underground vaults that protect them from radiation, mutants and other bad stuff. More art below.
NASA churned out a lot of concept art in the 1970s while the agency was exploring ways to build colonies in space. NASA concept artists created trippy pieces like the Cynlidrical Colony above, and Torodial and Bernal Sphere colonies as well. We'd like to imagine that you could low-grav the whole thing, and just leap from one side of the colony to the other. Of course, it's not quite clear what would happen if you ran into one of those giant window sections. Hopefully they're made out of some synthetic diamond material to keep accidents from happening.
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This is a drydock in HullBreach, a complete conversion for the Half-Life 2 video game. The team has an ambitious goal of creating 100% new content for the game, and they've been hard at work on it for several years. The game is set 2,000 years in our future, and involves a bloody world war that threatens to engulf the planet. So the upshot is, even 2,000 years from now, we won't be getting along.
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This concept art by Koshime, who also created the robo-bear with a giant canon (camera), reminds me of what I miss most about the show SeaQuest DSV. That show, with its super-excellent mega-sub captained by Roy Scheider (and science-geeked by a scrumptious Ted Raimi), captured the alienness of the deep ocean, a place as inhospitable to human life as outer space vacuum. In these strange arches and chambers, Koshime offers a glimpse of an alien undersea world, perhaps natural or perhaps created by intelligent life of the deep sea. [Gorilla Art Fare]
That hulking tankbot might look scary as hell if he were all alone, but somehow those falling leaves make the piece seem calm and serene. Bizarre, isn't it? German concept artist Lorenz Hideyoshi Ruwwe loves robots, gaming, and creating art. He's got everything from concept art, to finished digital designs to his own manga on his website, and he's currently working on a science fiction-themed short film called Dark Elephant by ILM animator David Weinstein. He's a fan of moody and cold scifi shots, and he's definitely managed to capture that in this piece.
This piece of conceptual art, entitled "We Never Learn," shows a dangerously overpopulated world with floating cities, parks, and layers that threaten to blot out the sky. Of course, that doesn't mean we wouldn't want to live there, flying cars and all. Although if you hit the ball out of one of those parks, good luck getting it back. And life on one of those lower levels is probably a horrible experience, at best. You not only get all the falling detritus from above, but very little sunshine as well. Still, for some reason the whole thing is hauntingly beautiful.
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