Blog7: Chris Metzen

Blog7: Chris Metzen (concept artist, designer, animator, at Blizzard Entertainment)

Interview with Chris Metzen: http://about-creativity.com/2008/04/an-interview-with-chris-metzen-part-1.php

"I think we soak in content. We chew on it. We digest it. What are the bits of these themes or these characters or these places that strike the chords within us emotionally? And our job is to spew back into the world."

                                                                                                -Chris Metzen
            These words spoken by Metzen ring true through my ears. I can honestly feel his passion and emotion for his game because I feel that same passion for the creations that I conjure up in my head. Chris Metzen is now a veteran artist working for the well-known company responsible for the games Diablo, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, and many more. His creativity coexisted well with the interests that he had as a kid following into adulthood which was his fascination with DND, also known as Dungeons and Dragons. He soaked himself within this fantasy world which fed his creative mind. Chris would pull ideas from this new game he came to love and tweak them to his own liking an image. This sort of pulling ideas from other successful games or ideas leads to the creation of other very successful games. In a sense, it is basically pulling the best ideas from one idea and then combining them into a larger mixing bowl of successful ideas. Artists have been doing this since the dawn of man. Even in the Renaissance, artists like Raphael and Rembrandt would look at Michelangelo's creations and borrow his ideas to create masterpieces of their own, even to the point where Raphael was working beside Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Artistic ideas spawn from the world around us, it is what we take in. If we take in these successful ideas that others have come up with in the past, they will have a positive effect on one's own work. Chris takes the world around him and the things he is passionate about and morphs them into something that is his own. Metzen started like many of us college students, again not knowing exactly what he wanted to do in life after college. When he was a young man fresh out of college he thought his career path would take him into the direction of a musician for a band. But then luck found him at a gig for his band. Chris drew up a dragon on a napkin where it was left to lay there and someone approached Chris who knew a company that would possibly want his artistic expertise. This company was known as "Chaos Studios" (also later known as Blizzard Entertainment. At the time Metzen had absolutely no clue what he was getting himself into. All he thought he knew was this was a graphic design company. Chris strolled into the studio and gave the boss his life drawings and the boss immediately stated "would you like a job here?" With little to no experience with animation, Chris was thrown into the world of animation and was short after creating/animating characters like Batman in games like Street Fighter. Later he began to work on Warcraft II because his boss again came across his so-called "fake story" of how the game should be told, and once again the boss loved the story and made Metzen a designer of Warcraft II. From then on Chris Metzen has been a part of the Blizzard artists earning himself the title as one of the founders of Blizzard Entertainment.