Having played a critical role in the production of 1982’s Blade Runner, illustrator Syd Mead was asked what title he’d like to appear as in the film’s end credits. “Visual Futurist” was his reply. Now there’s a job role you’d enjoy explaining to people at parties. Mead was a modern-day farseer, using his skills as an industrial designer and concept artist to build the worlds of tomorrow. What’s more, his visualisations have had an immeasurable impact on video games and the many artists working within the industry.
It’s often said that games draw from an awfully narrow set of cultural and artistic touchstones. Never mind seven basic plots, there are only really two: sad man fights robots and space marines shoot aliens. Blade Runner, Aliens, Blade Runner again. Syd Mead, who died just a few weeks ago on the cusp of the new year, aged 86, is the artist behind the dominating aesthetic of an entire industry. His energy, spirit, DNA, spread out across games like ashes thrown to the wind.
In the 80s, Mead helped develop his fair share of theme parks and laser tag arenas, even a few casinos (pleasure hubs with as many flashing lights as any cyberpunk alley). It was always going to be natural for Mead to make the jump to games. He worked on a fair few: Cyber Speedway for the Sega Saturn was one of his earliest, making use of his famed vehicle-design skills. But he also returned to work on the lightcycles in Tron 2.0, designed the spaceships in Wing Commander 5, and even worked with Westwood Studios’ on their Blade Runner game. Much of this work was early concepting, sketching out hover cars and so on. Other times it was consultation. Most recently, Mead consulted on Aliens: Colonial Marines, fleshing out what he’d started all those years ago on the James Cameron film. In some respects, we’re unfortunate. An artist so talented, and willing to work in our space, who never found his ‘big’ game. But I don’t think it matters – there are so many indebted to him, shot through with his style, infected with his imagery.
Where to start with such an immense artistic legacy? Syd Mead always started with a car. His background was in industrial design, working for Ford Motor Company and later, US Steel. Mead was hired to make automobiles look desirable, to make the corporate cool. I can’t help but think of CD Project Red’s upcoming 2077, and how critical the car has been to its marketing. A lounging sportscar is the 20th Century’s addition to the romanticist image of the figure, back to the viewer, looking out to a wide horizon. There’s something fetishistic about 2077’s automobile – 80s stylishness crashing against Mead’s careful retrofitting – but it also seems necessary. The Night City needs a car the same way NeoTokyo needs its motorcycle.
Mead’s pin-up cars were sleek and cutting-edge, but aspirations always extended further. It was an era of techno-optimism, and Mead was just as apt at envisioning scenery as he was coupes. If the cars could hover and fly, then so too must the distant cities and spires silhouetted against the alien world’s setting suns. In fact, what was originally created to support the vehicles Mead designed, often overshadowed them.
Mead was originally hired to design just the vehicles for Blade Runner, but the automobile – his speciality – was an opportunity. It was how he opened portals to other times and places. While sketching out the film’s iconic “spinners”, Mead began to think bigger. A car was only as exciting as the surroundings mirrored in its polished surface. Only as cool as the landscape it cruised by. So important was “the flowing cascade of reflection”. “The chrome ignites with a hundred blue-white suns,” Mead once said. A rough sketch wasn’t enough. He needed a dark, rain-slicked street for the headlamps to illuminate. In the Polish cyberpunk game Observer, you begin your investigation in the cockpit of one such police car, the windscreen protection from the polluted downpour, the dashboard lit up like Times Square. It’s a prototypical Mead image.
With Blade Runner, Syd Mead transformed cold technical drawings into snapshots of urban night-life. A cold cityscape suddenly came to life, evoking the lonely realism of an Edward Hopper painting. The flashes of future Los Angeles we were gifted are striking: neo-noir with a Gothic tinge, abandoned apartments, streets draped with cables and wiring. Balanced against this was the bustle of the market stalls and shopfronts with their neon signs and cryptic symbols beaming out into the darkness, although only ever to make the shadows more dramatic. It’s quite a thing to invent the entire aesthetic of cyberpunk almost by accident. An entire genre brought to life because the taxi cabs looked a bit dull just sketched there on their own.