During the 1970s, Rodney Matthews' otherworldly fantasy paintings conquered more than 70 album jackets by the lofty likes of Asia, Thin Lizzy, Nazareth, and members of Yes, as well as the covers of books by science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock.
When Shadow Master, a new PlayStation videogame creeps into stores 24 February, Matthews' armored insects and laser-eyed skull creatures will return to haunt another generation of adolescents.
Where a drooling audience once traveled through tech-organic psychedelia with incense and rolling papers, the new and vividly menacing nightmares are navigable via joystick.
Shadow Master, published by Psygnosis, is a typical fast-paced first-person blaster, like Quake, but the myriad 3-D foes encountered are unusual and complex, patterned after insects and flying eagles instead of grotesque movie monsters.
Matthews already poked imaginations with technology's help in 1996, when Canadian developer ICE released a CD-ROM anthology of his paintings, Between Earth and the End of Time.
Instead of letting the mind wander through his lavish landscapes like "Chase the Dragon" and "The Last Ship Home," however, the seven worlds of Shadow Master require a single split-second interaction: obliteration.
"I do not enjoy the concept of blasting everything that has life," says the artist from his home in England; voicing an outlook as alien to videogame culture as any of his extraterrestrial creations. Indeed, Shadow Master rewards proficient button-mashers with a different kind of cathode exorcism - the carnage depicted is electro-mechanical, not the dripping gore of Doom or Duke Nuke 'Em. The distinction is slight, but significant.
With Shadow Master, Matthews joins other art world peers who have dipped into the cultural pond of videogaming. In 1996, the Designers Republic invested anti-gravity racing game WipeOut with a powerful style that helped get the PlayStation console off the ground. More recently, Rodney Alan Greenblat brought forth the inventive Parappa the Rapper, also for the PlayStation. In other instances, videogames now define fantasy art, such as Final Fantasy VII, which uses dramatic Heavy Metal-style artwork as static background mattes.
Translating intricately-detailed paintings to computer-animated polygons for Shadow Master had its frustrations, as Matthews learned. "The creative team struggled to achieve faithful copies of my mechanical critters," he says, "but sadly also added some ideas of their own which were the subject of some debate and objection. My original artwork was watered down considerably."
The lead artist of Shadow Master, Andy Ingram of Hammerhead Studios, concurs, describing a "heavy metal hero" and a "massive desert train" which were too impractical to include in the project. "We couldn't do the sweeping curves and long tendrils that are Rodney's trademarks. With polygons, you have to make some allowances."
If Shadow Master is a mixed success, Matthews is ready to try again. "There are certain genres that make great vehicles for a combination of rock music, science fiction, and fantasy," he says, "the most obvious being film and, of course, videogames. Shadow Master is the first computer game influenced by my artwork. Hopefully it is not the last."
