Name that ship!

The artist for the unused manual stuff was someone named Greg Follender, who wasn't with Origin -- he was based in New York City and did the stuff on commission. There's some copies of faxes between him and Joel Manners in our archive section. I'm certainly curious about why they ended up dropping the art (he also did art for the rest of the manual, including line drawings of all the ships, which also didn't get used).

Glen Johnson's Claw Marks artwork was certainly the basis for it.
 
Weighing in...

Howdy folks...

This is Greg Follender... the artist in question in regards to those unused Freebooter manual illustrations.
Incidentally, some of the artwork sandwiched in between the game images is an excerpt from an old graphic novel I created and sent to Joel Manners as a sort of tryout for the job when he first pitched it to me.

Very strange looking over that stuff after so long... oh... and damned painful as well.
Some of it is just plain embarrassing. Still... I was very young and hopeful and it was one of my first paying freelance gigs. Too bad it never went anywhere. They never even really told me why they dropped the finished manual from the project... money issues are all they would offer for an explanation.

As far as the name of the artist you mentioned in prior posts regarding my works influence... I've never heard of the man. All I was given was basic schematics of each ship and idea sketches for basic costuming. The rest is all me... in al it's lackluster glory. If the images do seem coincidentally reminiscent of another artist's work... then I truly feel bad for him, poor bastard;)

I'm glad someone posted those images though... all I have are the loose originals (which look a HELL of a lot better than those low-res scans, I must say... relatively speaking of course) and they are a pain to handle because of their age and fragile condition.

Thanks for the kind words though, folks...

Regards,
GREG
 
Howdy folks...

This is Greg Follender... the artist in question in regards to those unused Freebooter manual illustrations.
Incidentally, some of the artwork sandwiched in between the game images is an excerpt from an old graphic novel I created and sent to Joel Manners as a sort of tryout for the job when he first pitched it to me.

Very strange looking over that stuff after so long... oh... and damned painful as well.
Some of it is just plain embarrassing. Still... I was very young and hopeful and it was one of my first paying freelance gigs. Too bad it never went anywhere. They never even really told me why they dropped the finished manual from the project... money issues are all they would offer for an explanation.

As far as the name of the artist you mentioned in prior posts regarding my works influence... I've never heard of the man. All I was given was basic schematics of each ship and idea sketches for basic costuming. The rest is all me... in al it's lackluster glory. If the images do seem coincidentally reminiscent of another artist's work... then I truly feel bad for him, poor bastard;)

I'm glad someone posted those images though... all I have are the loose originals (which look a HELL of a lot better than those low-res scans, I must say... relatively speaking of course) and they are a pain to handle because of their age and fragile condition.

Thanks for the kind words though, folks...

Regards,
GREG

Thanks for the info Greg. It really is a shame the art never got used. No matter how much better you are now, they're certainly a whole hell of a lot better than I could ever manage!

Also I'm certain the CIC guys would gladly host higher resolution scans of the images here as well.

AD
 
Woah, very cool that you found us! I'm the guy who scanned all that -- they're from a folder of photocopies that was still lying around the Digital Anvil/former Origin offices in 2003.

Everyone we've shown that art to agrees that it would have been a lot cooler than what they went with (screenshots from the game and big blocks of text without much art at all).
 
Thanks!

You guys are WAAY too kind ;)

I really appreciate the fact that you folks are even concerned about the work... to tell the truth, i truly did enjoy the job while I was doing it.

Just in case you folks are interested (and since you've been such good sports abut the whole thing), here is the address of my blog that charts the recent progress of the graphic novel I've been working on for awhile now. It's not fine art, that's for sure... but it's a fun distraction for me... and perhaps looking through the old posts to see the progress of the work might interest the comic book fans among you.

Check it out if you've got nothing better to do:

http://slumberinggiant.blogspot.com/

Again, thanks so much for your generous words... this has been an odd nostalgic trip for me to be sure!
It's good to have found you fellows... and I'm honored to have participated in a project that you deemed at least semi-worthy of note!

Warmest regards,
GREG
 
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