Jun 17, 2009

Zombie Hand

Categories: Arts & Crafts |Microsoft |PC / Mac

The box art for Left 4 Dead is as clever as it is simple, it depicts an outstretched Zombie hand (sans thumb) that looks poised to grab some brains. Its meaning is two fold, first it screams “Zombies” to any passer by and second, and on a more subtle level the four fingers are meant to represent the four survivors. Exactly which finger represents which survivor is not specified, so we are free to make our own assumptions about that little detail.

You might be interested to know that the hand used for the box art is real and belongs to Valve artist Andrea Wicklund, little details like this are unfortunately lost on me and I never made the connection. Upon seeing the box art for L4D I was hit by the confidence not to reveal anything about the game, the funky green colour scheme and how much of an improvement it was to the Orange Box.

The art staff at Valve had three simple rules for their design brief for the box art:

There should be a hand in it somehow.

The hand should have a thumb bitten off, so customers would look at the four fingers remaining on the hand and think, “Hey, four.”

Under no circumstances would we use Photoshop.

As you might have assumed biting peoples thumbs off isn’t acceptable in polite society and even though Andrea is happy to demonstrate the theory behind hand biting. Andrea was forced to employe both camera trickery and the inevitable photoshop to produce the sequel box art that features just two fingers.

Of course with all this talk of biting people’s fingers and thumbs off, you have to wonder if this is one of the reasons behind some what extended development time. After all, my typing speed with a full complement of digits is slow enough as it is. I dread to think how slow it could be with one or two missing.

Source L4D