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Joystiq interview: Soenke C. "Warby" Seidel
Earlier this week, we stumbled upon de_wanda, a wonderful Counter-Strike map depicting a giant Shadow of the Colossus foe battling a large tentacled beast we later learned (and cursed ourselves for missing) inspired by underrated gem Beyond Good & Evil.We sent along a few questions to the map's creator, Soenke C. Seidel, who currently resides in Germany. Seidel, alias Warby, has also worked on the Half-Life sidescroller Codenamed: Gordon and Alliance: The Silent War and has shown through concept art great reverence for Fumito Ueda's PlayStation 2 hit. How long did it take you to do the map?When people ask me this question, I usually just respond 4 months. The truth is, I don't remember anymore. I started it this summer and I released it [in the] beginning of December, but I already sketched out the colossus and the layout long before that, at the time when the game Shadow of the Colossus got released in the U.S.What was your inspiration? Well obviously Shadow of the Colossus for the bomb target statue, but the rest of the city is inspired by a not well know Ubisoft game called Beyond Good and Evil that I found in a bargain bin for 1 Euro a month or so prior to start building the map (best buck i have ever spend). Pretty much all textures you can see in the map are made from a photo collection provided by another great German artist "Thomas Hess" ... they inspired me quite a bit, too. He shot them in Southern France and even though Beyond Good and Evil is set on an alien planet, you can clearly feel [Ubisoft's] French architectural influences. So that was a lucky coincidence that matched up so nicely.
