Leftovers from Springfield

Back in 2006 I worked as a Concept Artist on "The Simpsons Game" for Electronic Arts. I've recently been backing up some files when I came across a few images that I had created for the game. I'm not sure if these even made it into the game. I know for sure that "The Shims" was cut because, as I learned when I moved to The Sims team at EA, they weren't very pleased with the image and didn't give it the go-ahead.

One of my producers on the project had tasked me with creating some images that would appear either at the Game Stop store in Springfield or somewhere in the game later. So I decided to take some of my favorite games as well as some beloved EA Franchises, and "simpsonize" them. Here are a few!

I believe this one was a dual effort of mine and another artist. I basically took his rough sketch and cleaned it up.


I'm a huge Half-Life fan, so I would take any chance to squeeze in a reference to that series. Flavin!


This was my attempt to remind the fine folks at EA that they used to have an awesome football series that didn't include the word "Madden" followed by a number. I'm not a sports guy at all... I avoid sports like the plague, but I LOVED "Mutant League Football" on the Genesis. I would happily take an XBLA reboot of Mutant League Football.


This was an interesting one. I had moved onto Dead Space after wrapping up work on the Simpsons, but the game was still in development for about another year. I had some downtime on Dead Space, and I was lent out to The Simpsons team for about a week. I drew this up for the studio as an homage to what I knew was going to be a great classic game. The problem was that the Simpsons Game was going to be released before Dead Space was even announced. I'm not sure if it made it into the game or not, but they did turn this into a poster that was hung up around the studio for a while.

The Frakkin Toasters

In honor of my shirt sale at Teefury , I have created another image in a similar style to the River Tam and the Fireflies piece. This time however I set my sights on one of my other favorite Sci-fi series in recent years, Battlestar Galactica.

I had so much fun trying to work Battlestar into an album cover, but there were so many characters... and they're ALL awesome!



I wasn't sure which direction to take it at first, so I started with a name. I had thought of a few that weren't quite working for me, and when I wrote down "The Frakkin Toasters" I knew I'd found my direction.

Of course it's a sorta punk-new wave-metal band. I imagined they would sound something like "The Network" but instead of Billie Joe's vocals (you're not fooling anyone Green Day) Caprica 6 would handle lead singer duties. And as much as I loved the Centurions from the rebooted BSG, I still feel the Original Cylons are much more iconic.



Once I had the band name and the album cover sketched out, I needed a catchy title. Since it was a cylon themed image, it was pretty clear what the album should be:


Here is the album cover:


I love doing all of the design work, but I also really enjoy coming up with songs that would be on an album such as this. It wasn't until I started doing some research for song titles did I find out that Caprica 6 has a phrase that she repeats multiple times throughout the series. When she meets a human for the first time, she asked them, "Are you alive?" which in both deep and awesome, so that's definitely the song to open the record with. I also learned that the term "CYLON" was an acronym created for the re-booted series, and if there's one thing I love, it's acronyms! The 5th song on the album is called "The Final 5" for pretty obvious reasons. As for the rest, they're pretty straight forward. Okay... maybe not, "End of line" is awesome because I look at is like a Tron reference, but it's also often spoken by the Hybrids in the weird Cylon bathtub. I thought about including the song title "All Along the Watchtower" but that song really pulled me out of the fictional world on the show, so I decided against it.



I'm hoping that Teefury will turn the design into a shirt. I've submitted it, but have yet to hear back from them, so if you happen to come across this site, feel free to visit http://www.teefury.com and send them a friendly message of what you'd like to see. Also, as always, prints are available on my Etsy store, just click here :)

Live long and prosper... oh wait, wrong show.
-Joey