I don’t know if I’ve ever actually discussed this on Fine Art before, it’s just something we have to work with in the background and I haven’t wanted to bore you with the details, but you should know that video game artists are rarely, if ever, allowed to just share their work whenever and however they want.
Working on a video game, whether you’re a studio employee or freelancing or employed by an outsourcing company, means in most cases signing away your artistic life. The stuff you make for the game usually belongs to the people making the game, and even when it’s done, sometimes you’re not allowed to share everything you did, or if you are you need to wait for a certain amount of time to pass.
It’s dumb, but then, no more so than any other aspect of video game development that’s steeped in legal bullshit. Anyway! Hopefully that answers any questions you may have had over the last decade and change as to why these features run weeks, months and sometimes even years after a big game is released; the answer is usually because it took that long for artists to be allowed to share their stuff publicly!
Which is a very long-winded way of saying welcome to this gallery showcasing the incredible work that went into the creation of God of War Ragnarök, a blockbuster that was a lot of people’s game of the year for 2022. As usual for a feature of this size—we ran one earlier this week!—it’s not everyone who worked in every area of the game’s development, but it’s a nice cross-section. Indeed this feature is so big, and showcases so much stuff from so many talented people, that I only really had the bandwidth to feature illustration work (you can see a lot more stuff at this art blast).
As usual, you can check out more of each artist’s stuff in the hyperlinks found in their names below.
