Is this videogame photography?

I prefer the term ‘videogame tourism’. Practically, though, the closest analogy would be the work of a Unit Stills Photographer hired by film productions to capture shots for publicity use. Their job is less to create a scene than capture its flavour, its movement, in a single frame. When circumstances allow, though, I do take control of characters, animations, timescales and environment to explore a game’s assets and moods. Almost every shot on Dead End Thrills will, at the very least, involve free control of the game’s camera. The one above does not because I am an idiot.

What resolutions are Dead End Thrills shots available in?

There’s generally only one resolution that goes around here, which is 1080p (1920×1080). I could go higher but the Steam Hardware survey says that very few other people do, and I can’t guarantee the same image quality about 1080. That said, most images are now captured at 2160p for the benefit of print publications and a planned art book for charity. Anyone wanting those resolutions should get in touch.

How do you achieve such high image quality?

I try and list any tools used with each post, but the general process involves grabbing at 2160p in realtime, using FXAA or similar for antialiasing, and then downscaling the image in Photoshop. This eliminates most of the common artifacts that separate realtime art from other forms. Images produced prior to the divine inventions of FXAA and MLAA might get additional edge work using a Photoshop antialiasing filter.

How do you achieve 2160p rendering?

My personal method for rendering games at 2160p, which is a higher resolution than almost any consumer monitor supports, is derived from a tutorial that sadly doesn’t seem to exist any more. Furthermore, it’s only achievable on certain displays, potentially dangerous if your monitor isn’t one of them, and enormously taxing on graphics hardware. I literally burn through some of the most expensive gaming hardware on the market to produce many of these shots, so bear that in mind before reading further. The method is basically: 1) hack the EDID values of your monitor’s driver so that its native resolution is 2160p; 2) create a custom 2160p resolution through the Nvidia Control Panel and registry, using unique monitor timings to display the result through 1080p pixels; 3) select the newly available 2160p resolution in regular game options; 4) use an FXAA/SMAA injector or thirdparty app (Fraps, PlayClaw, etc.) to grab the full 2160p shot. There might well be new or updated tutorials and methods for this elsewhere on the net. Newer Nvidia drivers have broken this ‘feature’, however, which is why I’m stuck with a much older driver for the foreseeable future.

What are your hardware specs?

Motherboard: Intel® Desktop Board DX58SO2
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-980X Processor Extreme Edition (12M Cache, 3.33 GHz, 6.40 GT/s Intel® QPI)
Videocard: Nvidia GeForce GTX580
RAM: 6gb Corsair DDR3 @ 1351MHz (2gb DIMMs)
Storage (OS): Intel® Solid-State Drive (Intel® SSD) 320 (120gb)
Storage (Games): 2x Samsung HD250HJ 250GB Internal SATA 8MB 7200RPM (500gb RAID configuration)
Monitor: Samsung 2333SW 23″ Widescreen DVI LCD Monitor

All graphics hardware is generously provided by Nvidia, who didn’t actually ask me to say that – I just happen to like them and they happen to like me. That bit’s important, though, because it means I run their hardware at temperatures that could fry an egg. Whenever I play STALKER, my household heating bills drop and local firemen have to cancel their holidays. I guess what I’m trying to say is: don’t try this at home.

Are the images ‘doctored’ in any way?

I do put the screenshots through Photoshop, but only to eliminate aliasing or correct gamma problems common to capture tools like Fraps and PlayClaw. The objective is always to get the images as close to the artists’ work as possible, and any posing or post-processing effects are done in-engine. Very rarely, if the game has been seen a million times before, I might use an effect like Super Depth of Field in Garry’s Mod to make things interesting, but that’s as far as it goes.

What plans do you have for the site?

I’m hesitant to share them in case they don’t happen for one reason or other, but the plan is very much to become an effin’ brilliant tribute to game art in all kinds of effin’ brilliant ways. How effin’ vague is that? I’ll point them out as they start coming together. What I will say now is that the purity and uniqueness of Dead End Thrills – ‘realtime art’ – will always be its backbone. Attempts to copy it don’t end prettily, and I’ve yet to meet a webmaster with the complex web of compulsive personality disorders needed to change that situation.

What’s a Community Shot?

This new section of the site hopes to broaden the tribute to realtime art by publishing the very best shots by site visitors and beyond. Because this material varies greatly in image quality, the shots are shown exclusively in the site’s 1024×576 browsing resolution. It was decided not to link to larger versions as Dead End Thrills is not primarily a desktop wallpaper site, and strives above all to present images free of technical flaws. Furthermore, many of the images selected simply haven’t been grabbed using high resolutions or quality antialiasing.

How do I submit a Community Shot?

Dead End Thrills has a public Flickr group which anyone can join and contribute to. Images are then chosen regularly for the Community Shot section. Really, though, any awesome shot I’m made aware of and have permission to use will do.

Awesomeness aside, why does a shot get published?

It’s probably easier to say why a shot won’t be chosen. Bad composition, visible compression and HUD objects are instant turn-offs. Anything like tone adjustment or post-proc effects has to be done in-engine, whether through Photo Mode functions, hacks or mods. Photoshop is only acceptable for brightening shots, downsizing from higher resolutions, applying offline post-processing and otherwise addressing technical flaws. Shots from games that regularly appear on this or other sites/forums won’t be ignored outright, but will have to be pretty damn good to qualify. Conversely, captivating images from seldom-seen games are ideal, assuming they look great at 1024×576. Flickr has an excellent downsizing algorithm which means you can just upload larger resolutions and let it do the rest if desired.

What’s your favourite shot?

This one. The game is Dark Void, one of Capcom’s (commercially) less successful collaborations with Western developers. It’s not just a beautiful image but proof, if proof be needed, that great game art doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. Back and forth this game went between Crimson Skies developer Airtight Games and Capcom’s former production boss Keiji Inafune, each exchange giving its characters and animation more flair. Sometimes, in its drive to embrace both ends of the spectrum – the traffic-pulling triple-As and the fashionably twee – the media saves just a cursory glance for games stuck in the middle.

What happened to all those old images you had?

For newer visitors, this refers to around 5,000 images I used to host both here and on Flickr in the early days of the site. Lots of images, lots of games. The problem was that the quality – of composition and rendering – was all over the place. There were great images, not-so-great images, and, for lack of a better word, bollocks images. It was unnavigable, numbing, and not what I wanted. Dead End Thrills must be gorgeous, always. I’m a lot more careful with what I post now, and regularly pluck the best from that as ‘archive shots’. I’m also working overtime to return to those other games and create all-new collections.

I work for a game developer who would love you to capture our game or feature us in some other way. What do you need?

What a pleasant surprise! Most publishers and developers would sooner consider economy class tickets on the White Star Line. But if you want people to see your games looking like a million dollars from a hundred different angles – because, y’know, it’s not the dumbest idea – you can help by supplying builds of your game with debug functionality: free camera control, maybe, timescale control, FOV adjustment, and definitely HUD removal. Mail me and we’ll talk, or ignore me and I’ll tear your game inside-out to get what I want. And if that doesn’t work, it probably means you’re the maker of Batman: Arkham Asylum or Bulletstorm, in which case we really do need to talk.

Who do I make a donation to?

You don’t.

Who, or what, are you?

Much as I wish I was Buckaroo Banzai, the rockstar neurosuregeon who rolls with Perfect Tommy and Penny Pretty and drives through mountains and kicks burning filing cabinets and points out incongruous watermelons, sadly I’m just Duncan Harris, the videogame journalist. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it. Over the years I’ve written over a thousand pages of published copy for the UK specialist games press, for magazines including Edge, PC Gamer, PSM3, Official Xbox Magazine, Official PlayStation Magazine, and Xbox 360 World. I also supplied over a hundred entries for the book 1001 Games You Must Play Before You Die… and almost died.

I dabble in user interfaces occasionally. On a good day, I design and script something like Aeon or Alaska for XBMC. Well, maybe not ‘a day’ so much as ‘two years’ of bittersweet memories and insomnia, but that’s another story. I understand the XBMC community has taken these far beyond what you see here. They might even have finished them, but I’m afraid to look.

A friend of mine explicitly likes movies featuring hostage scenarios; I’m nowhere near that cool. But I do like movies made with buckets of love and bugger all money. I would lose an organ to save the works of Roger Corman or Paul Verhoeven, and give my life for John Carpenter’s. The very first times I was taken to the cinema were to see Starcrash, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Pinnochio, one of which was preceded by Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie. I have no idea what this means, but most of what I now enjoy has something in common with Barbarella. My favourite decade is the Seventies, and I once interviewed Charlton Heston and still like his movies. My Dad is a pervert who owns every episode of Star Trek. I think it’s in the genes.

Great art is great art, but if I had to choose favourites I’d pick Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, Cam Kennedy, Michael Kaluta, Edgar Franklin Wittmack, Roger Dean, Michael Pangrazio, Stanley ‘Artgerm’ Lau, Dan Malone, Jean-Claude Forest, and Syd Mead. Basically, if you put me on the art team of a videogame company, I’d bring nothing to the table.

The games I tend to like defy the odds to bring you style, personality, and technical magic. I like to explore virtual worlds and don’t care about gameplay unless you pay me to. I don’t like games that boast about being ‘indie’ or use it as a crutch. I like sound in games and have a strange obsession with idle animations. I like chicks and guns, or guns that seemingly have chicks attached to them. I have completed Bullet Witch four times and am pretty much ambivalent about it.

The first coin-op I ever completed was Gorf, back when I was still young enough to think you could turn an ice cream upside-down without it ending in tears. My first computer was an Oric-1 which made synthetic clack noises when you pressed the keys, which made coding a version of Hunchback from the pages of a magazine bloody awful. I never did get it to work. I owe the rest of my gaming life to, in order of ownership: the BBC Micro, Vic 20, Acorn Electron, Atari 800XL, Amstrad CPC464, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga (for life, yo), Sega Mega Drive, SNES, and all that came along after PlayStation. Zybex, X-Out, Encounter, Mercenary, Kult, Nitro, Carrier Command, Stunt Car Racer, The Last V8, Overlander, Ranarama, Black Lamp, Wizball, Molecule Man, Turmoil… I play them in dreams.