Dead End Thrills es, en las palabras de los creadores, un sitio dedicado al talento, la pasión e imaginación de los mejores videojuegos del mundo. Cualquier juego que contenga arte que se destaque y que esté al mayor nivel de lo mejor de la industria puede ofrecer.
Dead End Thrills is a site dedicated to the talent, passion and imagination of the world’s leading videogames. Any games, in fact, featuring art that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best the entertainment industry can offer. Historically, these extraordinary collective visions have been hard, if not impossible, to appreciate, trapped behind layers of technology and distraction. Developers, marketing people, PR agencies, journalists, players: few have shown the time or desire to strip those layers away.
Applying the principles of real world photography to the virtual worlds of games is just part of the solution. Hacking and tweaking games to remove player model, HUD and restrictions on the camera are others. The toughest, though, is rendering games from throughout the 3D era, from Deus Ex to Crysis 2, at truly uncompromising quality. There is a massive difference between running a game with top-of-the-line antialiasing and quality settings, and running it with those same settings at resolutions far in excess today’s norms, using offline resampling to achieve perfect results. Only recently, and after extensive research, have such methods become possible.
There is no discrimination here. Art is art, whether it’s in Half-Life 2 or Transformers: War For Cybertron. Not all games give it up easily, though, which is why some games take longer than others, or just won’t appear at all. Few developers have ever volunteered the means to shown their games off, and some don’t even have the means available.
Also featured here are highlights of art that isn’t realtime, but rather traditional ink and CG work used for promotion and pre-visualisation. The entertainment industry is slowly coalescing, as are many disciplines of art itself. Though its cover art has some catching up to do, the concept art of games is on a par with that of a Hollywood blockbuster. You’ll find such work here, untouched and at its original resolutions.
It’s worth noting, though, that the site itself is the work of one man. A gamer. That means cars crashing into zombies, and zombies crashing into chicks with massive guns. It means massive guns in the hands of garden gnomes, and garden gnomes in the hands of chicks with massive guns*. It means spaceships and Star Trek; gimps and Mad Max. It means tiny-looking people looking at massive bloody landscapes, occasionally under at least two moons, and sometimes under the sea. As much as Dead End Thrills hopes to save the art of gaming from the technology of gaming, that’s where its mission ends. Whatever you might hear, the culture of gaming needs saving from no one.
http://deadendthrills.com/
