Might & Magic X: Legacy Meet the Ancients Q&A
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When you think about your work on Might & Magic, what's the first association that comes to your mind?
The years I spent at New World Computing were some of the best of my career at the time, there was an enormous amount of opportunity to experiment and to contribute to the direction of a game, regardless of what your primary role on the team was. Team sizes were small and everyone worked together to create the best levels and the coolest art. Might and Magic VI was a unique game at the time in that it combined the variety and depth of real-time gameplay with the spectacular detail that pre-rendered worlds could illustrate. 3D rendering was a growing field and the software available on PC was making leaps and bounds with each release. Each mini cut-scene was an opportunity to experiment and discover new tools and techniques, and each animation was a new opportunity to create a more spectacular environment than the last. Illustrating the fantastic worlds of Might and Magic was both immensely challenging and rewarding.
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What inspired your work on Might & Magic?
When I started working on the Might and Magic series, there were relatively few well-known fantasy artists and still fewer published "art books" that one could collect or study. I remember admiring the work of Michael Whelan, Larry Elmore and in particular, the late Keith Parkinson, who I had the opportunity to work with briefly some years later at Sigil. I very much wanted to achieve the same immersive illustrated realism in the environments I created, and in particular to bring those environments to life with characters and visual effects. I felt like the fully-rendered environments I created were a reward to the players' efforts of crawling through miles of dungeons and battling hordes of orcs and spiders. We used to refer to these in-game cinematics as (eye candy). The cinematic renderings offered the detail and complexity that the real-time engine could not deliver, filling out the story aspect that is so important to RPG genre games. Bringing a written concept to life with spectacular visuals was challenging, but also quite rewarding.
