The art within the art of videogames | leisure and culture

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“Art is everything you see on the screen. From the main character, to the rest of the characters, the setting or the graphical interface that tells you how many bullets you have left in your pistol”. This is how Joaquín Otazu, head of the Secret 6 studio, defines the art of a video game. This Spanish studio is specialized in art for top-level videogames, and has contributed its talent to sagas such as Uncharted, The Last o Us o Tomb Raiderand are currently working on The Lords of the Fallen.

According to Joaquín Otazu, developers usually divide artistic styles into three large groups: “hyperrealistic, stylized or cartoon”, being the Call of Duty saga representative of the first group, the Borderlands saga of the second and The Legend of Zelda of the third -although the latter with some nuance-. In addition, promotional materials or covers of video games are also pieces of art, which have more room for artistic direction to innovate, but without being strange in the style of the title.

“At Secret 6 we offer different services, but in Madrid we are dedicated to art for AAA video games, large productions. We create scenarios, characters, concepts or visual effects ”, he has told us. On many occasions, it is necessary to translate into artistic works the ideas that the client (the main developer studio) has “more or less defined”, and the process begins with several conceptual drawings in two dimensions, later modeling in three dimensions and then to animation.

Conditioned by confidentiality clauses, Joaquín Otazu has told us that The Lords of the Fallen (release scheduled for 2023 but without a specific date) “has a much darker, realistic and gloomy/fantastic touch” than the first part of this saga. This Thursday, Otazu participates together with Javier García-Lajara (Hexworks manager) in the ‘Voxel Trends’ talk cycle at the ‘Voxel School’ University Center for Digital Arts in Madrid to talk precisely about art in video games. Until here the BEING Gamers of this week, have a good time.