Obituary: Fallout 3 concept artist Adam Adamowicz

Adam Adamowicz, a key concept artist behind some of Bethesda Softworks' most prominent titles, passed away this week. Adamowicz is remembered most as the man responsible for defining the visual style of Bethesda's Fallout 3. His art became one of the driving pillars behind the game's post-apocalyptic aesthetic, influencing everything from character models, environment designs, and beyond. He also worked on numerous other Bethesda releases, including the recently debuted Elder Scrolls title Skyrim. Shortly before joining Bethesda, he worked at Xbox developer VR-1 Entertainment, later known as Jaleco Entertainment. Before he ever joined the game industry, however, Adamowicz worked in print, doing freelance work for Dark Horse Comics' New Recruits anthology, sequential works for Fantagrafics Books' Duplex Planet, and cover illustrations to the now-shuttered Malibu Graphics. As noted on his personal blog, Adamowicz also took on a number of incredibly eccentric jobs earlier in life, including driving an ice cream truck, constructing haunted houses, creating window sculptures, apprentice tattooing, and even decorating erotically-themed cakes. It was a varied career, to say the least. A fellow concept artist wrote an article on the blog Awesome Robo chronicling Adamowicz's career, particularly noting his skill and humility. The article says, "I'd like to shine some light on Adam because he was an anomaly in the game industry, a veritable one-man conceptual machine, who unlike his contemporary counterparts, did a majority of his work in non digital mediums." "Fallout 3 was pretty much visually designed from the ground up by one humble man who got little to no recognition, nor sought it."