BACKGROUND
Tor Frick is a 3D artist who has been contributing to games like Wolfenstein, Doom, Far Cry 3, Fallout 4, Bulletstorm, Gears of War, and many others. For over ten years, Tor has been working as a designer, putting a cyberpunk/post apocalyptic twist into the game and film industries. He began his career after finding an interest in drawing and woodcarving, and eventually began 3D modeling small spaceships and other models.
Frick is a co-founder and art director at Neon Giant, a small indie studio made by experienced game industry veterans. Located in Uppsala, Sweden, the company was founded in 2018 and has worked with major gaming companies such as Unreal Engine, Amplifier, and Aldeon.
As art director, Tor Frick has helped in the development of many popular games. His aged cyberpunk style seems to fit perfectly with the common post apocalyptic themes in today’s gaming industry. Tor grew up at a time when science fiction and post apocalyptic art began to become popular in the film industry. He credits most of his ideas to other forms of art for inspiring him, but when it comes to his process, Tor says it’s a battle between having a plan and slowly working away from it, making a recognizable object unknown.
ART
Tor Frick’s style of art is one that can be described as many things. Frick builds a science fiction-like world that is built for the experience of anyone willing to travel to it. In each design, he seems to begin in the realm of science fiction, and slowly loses control of his designs, resulting in objects with complex shapes, colors, and details. It creates a clear and imaginable image that both seems fictional yet very realistic. “Even if I have a strict plan from the start, I often find new shapes and designs as I go that I feel work better. Sometimes I try them out and like them, sometimes I discard them. As long as it fits with the general design's purpose and feel of the original idea, I tend to just go with it.”
Science Fiction is a genre that has been a popular theme since the early 1950s. It’s created a new way of thinking about what could possibly come next in the fields of science, architecture, and many others. In a way, the science fiction genre has impacted these fields today by allowing us to imagine the goals we could reach. Hoverboard, holograms, and spaceships are just a few examples of this. Science fiction films, writers, and artists have not only pushed the limits of imagination but in a way the limits of science.
Game designers like Tor often are faced with the challenge of designing a world filled with futuristic items. This leaves the possibilities entirely up to the artist. Tor, is almost always involved with a project that is meant to look aged or in some way damaged. Going through the process of making a futuristic realm and representing it as old is not only a very difficult process, but a very unique one. Commonly, Tor designs objects as weapons, armor, or even a type of artificial intelligence. It’s an idea that further pushes the post apocalyptic theme of many of his designs, and connects a futuristic civilization of humans to a post apocalyptic war.
CONCLUSION
Throughout Tor Frick’s work, you’re able to see relationships between the futuristic objects and the aged and damaged style in which they are represented. The heavy masses that eventually become weapons, characters, or buildings have an almost brutalist spin to them. The objects are heavily layered in a way that makes each item seem like it actually would be able to function. The parts and pieces that emerge from each object creates a believable machine language. He creates most pieces to seem like they would actually function, like movable people or usable weapons, but he also makes pieces that purely represent the damage or aging that the object has been through. The purposeful broken or rusting metal pieces throughout the objects adds more layers of texture to the art. The realistic nature that Tor is able to create invites anyone into the realm that he has built, which is exactly what a game designer would want to accomplish.
Like many other examples of brutalist architecture, Tor’s work is somehow mysterious. It offers so much context on the exterior of the object by layering mass, detail, and color, but very rarely does it offer any context to the interior of the object. In many cases, Tor designs armor for game characters that are cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic themed, while these objects give amazing detail and context as to what is on the outside, it is still unknown what lies inside. In some cases, a character, in others, a robot.
This language of mystery and detail that Tor creates is something that fits the theme of science fiction. In many of Tor’s designs, these objects are placed on earth sometime in the future. The world that Tor creates for us describes an undesirable future, and allows us to learn or interpret how society has gotten there. For us, it seems so unreal but somehow we’re able to imagine that these characters and objects actually have a place on earth. The theme of futuristic technology seems like it is meant for a place far away from where we are now, but Tor’s convincing style is able to submerge us in possibilities of future technology and somewhat grounds his outer-world forms.
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