God of War | Art Gallery

With Bluecanvas' latest book, The Art of God of War: Ascension, now available, we asked Sony Santa Monica Studios Senior Art Director Chris Sutton to select his favorite images from the book to share with Polygon. An excerpt of sorts. Then he connected us with many of the original artists to provide commentary on what went into making them.

Scroll down, and you can see a loose evolution of the God of War franchise's art style and that of main character Kratos, from early concept sketches inspired by the Tarzan animated movie to his most recent, more grizzled form.

Click on each image below to read about what went into making each piece and learn details you might miss at first glance.

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Concepts

In the early days of God of War 1's development, the art team went back and forth between "a very stylized game with outlandish proportions or a very realistic, visceral approach" for main character Kratos, says Concept Artist Erik San Juan, noting 1999's Tarzan as an inspiration. San Juan says that one day during lunch, artist Charlie Wen drew a rough idea on a napkin, then took it back to the office, cleaned it up in Photoshop "and it became instantly clear what direction we were heading in."

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Box art

Perhaps the most commonly used artwork for the original God of War, this image made its way onto the game's box art and into many magazines due in part to its storytelling — showing main character Kratos approaching Olympus as he does in the game. "The subtlety in this image that people might not notice is that Kratos is a blend of our high resolution 3D cinematic model and 2D Photoshop over him," says Concept Artist Erik San Juan.

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Hades

While standing atop a platform from God of War 1's The Path of Hades segment, Kratos attempts to fight off enemies while making his way through some of the game's most challenging platforming sections. Notably, the image you see here only accounts for about a third of the original version of this vertically-oriented painting, with a long look down featuring many winged creatures and fire below clipped for space.

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Evolution

As the God of War series moved from PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3, Sony's art team wanted to combine Kratos' traits from early concept art and his PS2 character model in the more detailed PS3 model seen on the right. "The title of this image was originally 'Will the real Kratos please step forward' and was meant to illustrate the struggle in transitioning Kratos to the PS3, because each of these first three images of Kratos were wildly different but had to be represented fully in the God of War 3 model," says Lead Character Artist Patrick Murphy.

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Scale

For the Delos Landing sequence in God of War: Ascension, Kratos approaches a statue of Apollo off in the distance. Concept Artist Cliff Childs points out that unlike many pieces of character art, this image shows Kratos with his blades upgraded, with orange filling in the cracks on the side of his left-hand blade. Unlike other pieces of artwork created for Ascension, this image wasn't used much for promotional purposes, in part because it came along late in the schedule. "This was at the very tail end of development and I just think it didn't have to time to be finessed," says Childs.

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Arena

With God of War: Ascension's move into multiplayer, the art team took a slightly different approach compared to its campaign landscapes. For this Canyon arena image, Concept Artist Jung Ho Park says he took inspiration from the film Gladiator and art book Orientalist, and attempted to add a Persian feel through different column styles and cloth atop the stadium. "When you look closely on the middle of the image, you can see a gladiator spilling blood and trying to get up to win the fight," he says. "Just to give nice scale, I also added people in the audience. If I [had] more time, I [would] like to go in and punch out the details of the wall. Also, I [would] probably add more colors to give some accents."

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100 arms

God of War: Ascension's opening battle takes players through the prison of Hecatonchires: "a titan described as having one hundred arms and fifty heads," says Concept Artist Luke Berliner. While the arm count here is notably smaller, the idea applies of an enemy so large he houses prison cells inside his body, which the game reveals to the player over the course of the battle.

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One arm

As noted above, one of Hecatonchires' arms, seen here, eventually "breaks its bindings from the side of a mountain, leaving its hand behind, causing the environment to collapse and slide," says Concept Artist Luke Berliner. "I really like the way the architecture turned out on Hecaton — a mixture of stone, metal and petrified flesh. This painting was an opportunity to show how those elements fit together before we dynamically broke them apart."