Category: Old School Story Time

The last big team project I worked on was published in 2003. It was a (third person shooter) robot video game called Metal Arms: Glitch In The System. I was the Lead Artist on the team from concept development through final beta which is when art and code are finished but the game is being bug tested. My video game career ended at that point with debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome and subsequent surgery. The pain still gives me occasional grief thirteen years later :/ …Metal Arms broke my arm! Luckily I’m hard as fuck and kept on hustlin’. Making art is what I dig; video game graphics just kept the lights on for a time. I’m still making art and I obviously have electricity, so whatever.

I was recently contacted by a couple of awesome Metal Arms fans who are keeping the robot uprising alive 🙂 They’ve even started working on a self developed sequel! A fine DIY inspiration, guys. Everyone else: kick up yer grit, laggards. You can join the fun on their Facebook page or donate to the cause on Patreon. They asked for some pointers on concept art and a peek at any preproduction materials I might have.  I made games for nine years and I was always disappointed that the graphics had a shelf life limited to the games ultimate obsolescence. I was happy to oblige their requests.

< Click or tap anything to enlarge it: >

I’ve been digging (deep!) through the archives to retrieve any Metal Arms stuff I can find. I know I possess copies of MUCHO artwork representing every stage of game development but there’s two career artists living in this small house amongst thirty years of crap we’ve made and tons of art materials. It’s going kinda slow… So far I’ve found some printed promo stuff and a bunch of production sketches. I’ve yet to find any digital stuff but I know there’s butt-loads on these (totally useless until I find a Zip drive) super floppies. Remember these? They were called ‘Zip disks’ and they were super-floppies because they held up to 250 mb of data instead of the normal floppy limit of 1.44 mb. Back around the millennium it was common for digital artists to transport large art files on these disks because it was faster than burning a CD and these little shits are rewritable so you could reuse them. So now the problem is finding my old external Zip drive and connecting it to my year old computer which doesn’t have the ancient parallel port necessary to plug it in. I’m working on it so you’ll want to stay tuned because all the detailed color stuff and 3D rendered art is digital.

In the meantime, be stoked and enjoy some original Guy Sparger preproduction design sketches.  I’m scanning shit like a crazy scanning fool. It takes awhile. I have to scan, crop, auto adjust and compress each drawing so I’m doing it in batches. The first six sketches are batch number one. I’ll keep adding batches to the gallery as I find and process them. I have many more drawings in the stack currently on my desk.

I hope you enjoy the drawings. Metal Arms fans can share this post and it’s graphics freely 🙂