Game-Art-HQ

Horizon Zero Dawn: Turn Your Head To The Sun – by Esau Murga

“When I saw Horizon Zero Dawn on the list of games to pick for the Game-Art-HQ Video Game History Project, I had to grab it!

It was definitely my most favorite game of 2017 and immediately became one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve been working on it for a while I was waiting until February 28th because it would be the two year anniversary of its release!

The hardest part of this picture definitely had to be Aloy’s spear. I need to find out how to digitally paint light better. Anyway, I hope everyone likes what I consider to be one of my best pieces to date! Done in CS5 with Wacom tablet.”

The scene drawn for our Video Game History project illustrates the outcome of the final confrontation between Aloy and Helis, one of the main antagonists in the game. He believed he was the chosen one and was not able to understand how Aloy would be victorious.

It was one of the most emotional scenes in the whole game. 

Horizon Zero Dawn – A Masterpiece on the Playstation 4 that was in development for around 6 years

 – released in the USA on February 28.2017 and in Europe on the first March

Horizon Zero Dawn was – and still is – the second video game series by the Dutch developers Guerilla Games. This company created Killzone and its sequels for the Playstation 2, 3 and 4 systems but instead of working on the next first-person shooter, they created a single-player action-adventure with a big focus on the story but also the gameplay and never seen before visuals in a world where humans play only a small role while the world is populated by machines that act kinda similar to some kind of animals ..some are also of a giant size and more like dinosaurs even. 

The player experiences the story of Aloy, a hunter that uses a Bow, a Spear as well as traps and being able to use stealth as well to survive. Aloy has to survive, to explore her environments as well as to find out her past. The game received one expansion called The Frozen Wilds in November 2017.

Horizon Zero Dawn became one of the most successful games for both Guerilla Games, a company that started as a small team in the year 2000 (Thanks Al) with their first game being Dizzy’s Candy Quest for the Game Boy Color. It is by far the most successful game developer in the Netherlands now thanks to their cooperation with Sony and their creative ideas for Killzone and Horizon Zero Dawn. Over ten million copies of the game were sold by February 2019, recently the news was shared around that Guerrilla games are hiring people for the next Horizon Zero Dawn game. 

It is the first game from 2017 that was chosen for our project by an artist. 

The Artist behind our Illustration for Horizon Zero Dawn:

Esau Murga from the USA is one of the first artists actually that liked the idea of this website back in 2011 and allowed us to share some of his video game-related artworks here. A bit later he joined one of our first art collaborations, you can see his epic take on Raiden above.

Like myself, he is a big fan of Mortal Kombat and after I organized our first big project, an art tribute to the series with the goal to get all of the characters from the series drawn by different artists, he was on board in no time. More projects followed and Esau continued to participate in some of them while he was and is still working on his own Mortal Kombat Tribute Project, the Mortal Kombat Legacy series.

Horizon Zero Dawn was just his latest contribution to a Game-Art-HQ art collaboration, but he just returned to our Video Game History Tribute when we announced Round II for it. The next game he illustrates is the excellent Gears of War 2!

I can only recommend visiting his complete art portfolio that offers a lot of greatness!