In which our hero finally stopped screwing around and finally became something of a pseudo-professional freelance art-schmuck...

"Jesus Christ, Bill, where the hell have you been for the past four months?" everybody keeps asking me.

"I've been drinking martinis and crashing BMWs into busloads of retarded kids" has been my stock reply, though in this case "drinking martinis" is really just code for "designing murals for Hudson Entertainment's Bay Area headquarters" and "crashing BMWs" really just means "crafting hurriedly-rendered illustrations for the August issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly". I suppose the bit about retarded kids may be code for "drawing a kids' book about pirates", but I'm not allowed to talk about that just yet.

Anyway, here's proof that I've been doing things other than playing monstrous amounts of Halo and Catan since March:

Bioshock comes out in less than a month. Who knows if it'll be any good or not, but the production design for the game is pretty swell. It's not surprising that so many goofballs like myself are cranking out fanart for the game despite the fact that no one other than the developers (and a handful of press folk) has even played the goddamned thing yet:



You may've heard that the Super Mario 2 (the most mind-bogglingly underrated Mario game ever made) finally popped up on the Virtual Console a few weeks ago - this is me celebrating with a few vegetable-enriched doodles:







In the August issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly (with Soul Caliber IV on the cover), there's a two-page splash illustration that EGM staffer Michael Donahoe and I whipped up for the burgeoning/toungue-in-cheek puzzles n' games section in the back of the magazine. Can you guess the names of the 20 videogames hidden within the illustration?



...and here's some rough sketches I cooked up while brainstorming material for the piece:







Back in May I was asked by one of the head honchos at Hudson Entertainment (the US subsidiary of the company that gave us Bomberman and Bonk) to create a mural for their Bay Area headquarters, and lo and behold, this is what they had up on their walls just in time for the Bomberman Live press event in early June:





Oh, and here's a Deathly Hallows-related doodle I pooped out last night. Turns out that Neville Longbottom is EVERYBODY'S homeslice: