My name is Marek Bogdan. I am an artist working in games and this is my online gallery of drawings, screenshots, concepts and more. The work you see here was produced during my time at UbiSoft Montreal (1998 – 2003), IO Interactive (2003 – 2013) and Playdead (current home). Now that 'INSIDE' is out, the team is on to spinning a wonderful new tale. Stay tuned….
My colleague Morten Bramsen, who is mostly known for his wonderful work on the art of Limbo and Inside, has recently put out this album of personal musical experimentations. Hopefully/maybe it will be more widely distributed one day…
Last night, we finally held the long-delayed CP2022 event for the Playdead crew and a few friends. Our love for future megacity blues flowed, as most people went all in on costumes and partied like there was no happy tomorrow.
Our current offices are located at an address in Jorcks Passage in the center of Copenhagen. The building was commissioned by a sugar goods manufacturer and constructed between 1893 and 1895. It is quite a historic site, formerly housing a telephone exchange belonging to the telephone company KTAS and later Københavns Radio.
A few days ago, one of the twin grinders on our Jura coffee machine stopped working. We were puzzled until a technician looked inside the grinder mount and found the problem.
From my developer’s perspective, KL2 was a kind of small miracle. It somehow got made because a number of key elements just happened to align. The place we were at with the tech and the development schedule played a big part; At the time, IO needed us to deliver one last hurrah from the badly aging Glacier engine while the rest of the studio focused on Glacier2/Absolution and Mini Ninjas. Consequently, the wild postfilters that were used to achieve KL2’s lo-fi aesthetic could be argued more successfully than they otherwise would have been. Another factor was the fact that the core team (Rasmus, Anders, Karsten and Mads) was hungry, fearless and charismatic – able to push management and skeptical team members way off the beaten path. I remember that last part being a struggle from beginning to end, with many team members never believing in the vision, or truly understanding it beyond “YouTube aesthetic”, and constantly fighting against the various elements that supported it.
There is this perception among fans that developers would make better games if only the publishers, management let them. This is only partly true. In my opinion, the ones holding back creativity the most are some of the developers themselves. Game development isn’t easy, but it is definitely easier to stick to the formula. It’s easy to grasp and following it makes you feel safe and confident that you are doing a good job. KL2 was the opposite of that: every decision, from gun handling to loading screen design, required some level of rule-breaking ..and made you uneasy. I loved it.
But when you put your heart into something, it is nice to be understood, even if it’s out in the fringes of game world. So I definitely appreciate thoughtful articles like this one:
Video games website Project Icarus counts down the top 20 greatest horror games of the 2010s, just in time for Halloween and nearly the end of the decade.
This week, we received a mysterious package containing this wonderful double LP from Samuel van Dijk (aka VC-118A, Mohlao, Multicast Dynamics). It is titled Inside, and as it turns out, was inspired by our little game!
Luckily, we have a player in the office, so we immediately ran over to the hi-fi room and gave those records a first spin. They sounded fantastic on that dark, rainy day. Thank you Samuel, for the kind words and for sharing your work with us.
memory swap 