I realize the percentage of the market that care may well be too small to for game developer to cater for, but DAMN the Maori inspired facial tattoo’s in the video game world are bad.
Take this guy from the upcoming XBOX360 game Gears of War 2 above, real moko tell a story, this guy’s story is about the how he caught some temporary “tribal” tattoos from a Venice Beach face painter.
He’s built like Ngati Porou but his moko is all sorts of wrong.
On the right, this agent from the XBOX360 game “Crackdown” only fares a fraction better, but overall very little style or substance. I don’t feel there is anything wrong or exceptionally offensive about Maori influenced styles, but please, get a good Maori artist to design or at least consult on your projects. This way you won’t insult Maori with your dodgy ripoffs, you’ll get an aesthetic steeped in hundreds of years of design and development, and a character with much more depth in their design rationale. I got Inia Hohua to very quickly sketch up something a little more authentic.
Mark of Kri was a great game, released back in 2002 for the PS2. Rau (above) wasn’t suppose to be Maori, or any real polynesian ethnicity, apparently to avoid offending anyone down and around this part of the world. Then they make his main weapon is the Taiaha, a traditional weapon of the Maori warrior. This is like saying that the somersaulting black clad asian with a Shuriken isn’t Japanese. I think that is far more less respectful then doing your homework and getting things right.
It’s too late for Crackdown and Mark of Kri, but yo Epic! Get hooked up with my boy Inia, and you can fix that nancy’s ink up before Gears of War gets too close to going gold. Same goes for any other devs about to go “tribal”.
You can see some more of Inia’s work after the jump.
November 4th, 2008
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