This year’s summer Steam sale has ended, so say goodbye to all transactions. But hello some radial art! With the sale, an artist at Valve is now free to share all of the fake video game covers and covers she helped create hidden inside Steam’s massive digital catalog as a part of the hunt for the buyer. Sure, the games are fake, but I really want to play most of them.
The art for these nonexistent video games was created by Valve developer Claire Hummel. She previously worked on games like Half-life: Alyx and Westworld Awakening VR. And now, with the Steam sale over and its associated time travel event over, Hummel shared on Twitter all the cool covers she has created for various spoof games of various genres.
For example, here is a fishing game about not catching fish. I will play that.
And here are some key arts to a game about helping a very important king into the bathroom. Yes, I will play it too.
According to Hummel, the idea behind this artwork is to make it look “relatively convincing” so that it can blend in with thousands of other games on Steam. However, the game art and title are just weird enough that you might notice something that is “a bit odd to look at.”
Different game names and ideas created by Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton, a longtime Valve writer. When Hummel had a fake game name, she got to work making art for it.
Hummel explained on Twitter: “I was just trying to incorporate their energy in the final piece. “It was fun trying to create reasonably polished logos in a bunch of different styles/genres.”
This process has resulted in some weird but also very intriguing fake video games. For example, who wouldn’t want to at least see a trailer about Custard . Castle Small Claims Court?
On Twitter, Hummel shared that creating all these fictional video games from the future “was a lot of work in the end” but was still fun to do.
“I hope people have an incentive to look for each of these as much as we did them.”
