Swiss surrealist, Hans Ruedi Giger, is probably most well known for the creation of the "Xenomorph" and "Sil" from the movies Alien and Species respectively, but his body of work goes far beyond film. Album/magazine covers, guitars, mic stands, jewelry, anime, and interior design are just some of the areas in which he applied his creative endeavors. That said, the vast majority of Giger's art is in the form of airbrush paintings (more often than not) done on huge cavansas, which allowed for an impressive amount of detail. Because of this signature style and imagery it's not hard to to spot his influence when it comes to the visual presentation of certain video games.
Officially, Giger only every took part in the making of two games, both point-and-click adventure titles by the names of
Dark Seed and
Dark Seed II. I've mentioned them before in other blog posts so I won't go into detail about them here. If you are looking for more information by all means poke around Youtube and I'm sure you can find some excellent reviews/retrospectives on what are sadly pretty mediocre video games. Moving on...what I really want to cover here are games that used his visual style without consulting him or giving proper credit to his distinctive biomechanical look.
Since Alien was his most iconic work it's obvious that video games based on that franchise are filled with examples. There are over 25 retail video game products and that's excluding crossover media with the Predator franchise...needless to say, I'm going to skip over these titles because they are trivially easy to identify. Instead, I think it's more interesting to point out some games that use the basic Alien creature design without the licence to do so. Side-scrolling shooters
Metroid,
Contra and
R-Type are three examples featuring a large number of enemy types and environments reminiscent of H.R. Giger's paintings albeit limited in fidelity by hardware available at the time.
Xenophobe is another example (featuring biomechanical monsters) although it originally existed as an unusual arcade cabinet in which up to three people could play simultaneously on separate horizontal slices of screen real estate. Another multi-player arcade title,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time has an encounter with a yellow Alien-like foe in (where else?) a sewer.
Perhaps some of the most out of left field examples of biomechanics in video games can be found in titles like the last boss from
Ecco The Dolphin or the entire final stage (including final boss) of
Astyanax.
Space Quest 4: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers similarly has a very biomechanical area near the end of the game, although it somewhat foreshadows this in the beginning. Last on the list of H.R. Giger inspired surprises is none other than
Streets of Rage 2, which features an area within an amusement park about midway through the game that has a very biomechanical look to it. I guess it's supposed to be an in-universe horror-themed ride or attraction, but my instinct tell me someone on the development team really just liked his/her collection of Giger artbooks.
Increasingly later in his life, Giger created a number of sculptures that often gave the impression of being three-dimensional versions of his 2D artwork. All the games I've mentioned thus far are flat or forced perspective sprite based games. Indeed, the 2015 video game
Tormentum feels like a continuation of the
Dark Seed duology in terms of genre and overall visual presentation. However, there is an interesting game in the works called
Scorn (not to be confused with critically panned
Agony) that looks to be a genuine attempt to bring H.R. Giger's artwork into a fully realized 3D rendered environment. The genre appears to be FPS which is eyebrow raising, but I'm willing to withhold any kind of judgment until the game is actually out...after all
DOOM featured a generous helping of biomechanical wall textures (not to mention a cyberdemon) and it was a lot of fun to play.
Of course, there are many other examples out there I could mention. Side-scrolling beat'em up,
Alien Storm has a character select screen that feels practically like a cut and pasted job. Also, look no farther than the covers of
Alien Syndrome,
Alien Breed, and
Baal by Psygnosis for Giger inspired boxart...all old titles, I know, but if you want something more recent there's the AI constructs referred to as "Rusalki" in
Axiom Verge whose visual appearances are largely inspired by two of Giger's more famous paintings, "Li" and "Li II". It's amusing to think about this eccentric artist's influence, and how it has not diminished despite him passing away half-a-decade ago. Truly the man has a long shadow, which might well grow longer still in the years to come.
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