Tim Kirk (SF encyclopedia link; his website is defunct and his wikipedia page is an error-riddled paraphrasing of this entry as far as i can tell)

it took me a minute to find the actual artist because this fellow's folder was saved as tom kirk - and, in tribute to how much of the internet is junk copy-pasted from junk, there is A summary of the book a tolkein treasury floating around that calls him "tom" that's popped up in listings of the book for sale. (even though his name is on the back... it's tim...) it's weird how a typo can get stuck in the content mill like that.

LOVE WINS

I'm trying to find something and it's really bugging me that I can't.

Here's what I think I recall: the textures for the game Blade of Darkness were hand-painted, like on paper, with oil paint or gouache. The reason I think I remember this is because there used to be a website up with this huge collection of textures to download, much higher resolution versions than were in the game. I want to find this website again. Annoyingly, if I try to find info about this, I just find AI upscaled texture mods for the game 🥴

I believe these textures were used as one of the default texture sets in the Cube 2: Sauerbraten game engine.

I believe the website was the personal website of the artist.

I'm currently looking up every artist who worked on the game and the credits of sauerbraten to see what I can find. It's entirely possible that I'm misremembering what game it was from originally!

But can somebody with good internet sleuth skills help me? I feel more and more like a dumb-ass about digging up info these days, even about things from fairly recent history. Everybody keeps telling me that search is getting worse, but I think it's not just that. My skills have gotten a little rusty so I'd be open to any tips.

We got 'em!. It's the work of one David Gurrea according to this site. These are beautiful, to me. I love that they're high enough resolution here that you can make out the physical detail of the medium, but they're not specifically painterly looking. They look like game textures! The flat but semi-realistic style actually reminds me of the art on board game components from a certain era.

There's some other interesting details, some of these are clearly collages from bits of the same painting, there's a bit of digital post work, but with sharp, aliased edges. Details that would get lost when down-scaling them to game assets anyway!

Now there's the curious part. These clearly are the textures from Blade of Darkness, even if this isn't mentioned on David Gurrea's website. I had a hell of a time finding this out again though, and the way I got here from scouring an ancient Blade of Darkness fan website (thank you "big truck") until I found it in the 'cool links' section. This website even uses the textures as background wallpaper! David Guerrea is not credited for the game on Mobygames, (isn't mentioned in the rather detailed interview and team section of the above fan site either) and only has like one real game credit at all? (Commandos 2 if you're curious).

OK, so the artist moved on to working in the film industry as a texture artist (including Into the Spider-Verse, neat) and has a pretty full portfolio which does have Blade of Darkness and Commandos 2 in there.

I downloaded Cube 2: Sauerbraten just to confirm that they used these textures too and that my memory wasn't faulty. They also didn't credit him.

At least he's credited on IMDB.

Something really cool should happen to Embracer executives

This bit is just grimly funny. Is Embracer, a failing business that’s shutting down two to three studios every week, still a ‘major publisher’ in a meaningful sense?