Goodbye, Brian Smith (October 21, 2007)

[Bandit LOAF]

We've just been informed of some sad news: a member of the Privateer development team passed away earlier this week. Brian Smith was an Origin artist who worked on Privateer, Righteous Fire, Runes of Virtue 2 and the Longbow series. We've put together an online memorial here. I've tried to put together a few words - we would like very much for fans to send along their sentiments to be posted as well. The work that he did affected us all and it seems important that we remember him.

We all knew Brian Smith, in a sense.

He helped create one of the living, breathing worlds that Origin was so famous for. Who among us didn't spend their youth exploring every guild and shipyard in the Gemini Sector? We have a unique set of shared emotions because of that incredble game. We all know the lonely feeling that came from staring out your fighter's monochrome cockpit into the starry universe. We have all felt the thrill of a chase through a Kilrathi star system, the martial glory of a fleet of Paradigms and the purile enjoyment of a pleasure planet bar. We all fought the Steltek drone, laughed at the Retros and searchd in vain for the Kilrathi asteroid. The unprecedented scope and grandeur of Privateer are a strong common bond among all Wing Commander fans to this day. Brian helped make that.

Privateer had seven artists, Righteous Fire had three. We can't know which individual bases or which specific ships Brian might have created. Lets honor the man by celebrating the entire thing. A collection of original sketches from Privateer is available here. You can see how the team developed the fighters and the gameflow screens that are so ingrained in our memories. More than that, you can appreciate how much fun the group must have been - from using the Millneium Falcon as a placeholder to listing a different bad movie in the 'project' field for each storyboard.

We've also decided to make available 270 megabytes of Origin's 3D models including most of those created for Privateer. These are the source 3DS files used to render bitmaps in the games. For the first time you can awe at the incredible amount of detail that the art team put into each element of the game. Ships are dotted with writing and detailing that wouldn't have shown up if the in-game bitmaps were a hundred times their size. It's absolute proof of the dedication Origin's artists - including Brian Smith - put into their craft. You can download the collection here.

I hope, very sincerely, that you will write in. If nothing else, give us your fond Privateer or Ultima or Longbow memories. It seems like a fitting tribute, to remember those worlds. I also hope that someone who knew Brian will find their way here. I'm selfish: I want to know what kind of person he was, I want to hear about those days creating worlds. We fans will remember the artwork for the rest of our lives... and I want to have something to remember about the man behind it, too.

​

--
Original update published on October 21, 2007

 

[Klavs81]

Very sad, touching news. Godspeed Brian, and good luck. We can but follow in your footsteps, thank you.

 

[Drizzt Do Urden]

Farewell you will be missed. and thank you

 

[Kevin Caccamo]

Good luck, Brian Smith. Always remember that you will never be forgotten. What may have been easy for you is unthinkably hard for us.

 

[ChrisReid]

It's been almost fifteen years, but nothing has replaced the sense of freedom and awe of exploring the Gemini Sector. Thousands of us have fond memories of peering down the long corridors of asteroid bases, paying a visit to the Mercenaries Guild or getting caught up in the hustle of New Detroit/Constantinople. I spent many hours seeking out a friendly face in some space bar to talk to, and now we have a real face to attach some of those memories to. I'm not sure if he was aware of his creations' massive following over the years, but maybe he has a little idea now. Thanks for making so many of our good times come to life.

 

[NinjaLA]

Well put, Chris, and a sentiment shared by thousands of wing commander fans on this sad day.

 

[Bob McDob]

It's late and I'm too tired at the moment to put together any sort of truly coherent memorial passage, but - while I never met the man, don't know how he died and the manner of his death, and thus can't say I feel remorse - reading through the accomplishments in his obituary, and in particular the giant spaceship model in the background of his picture, does leave a tinge of regret.

All that said, I am very familiar with one particular aspect of his work - his art. Back when I worked on Privateer fan projects for Freelancer, I had the distinct privilege of viewing many of the CG models he helped create, long before they were released here. Comparing them with the earlier models from Wing2, I'm struck by just how much more intricate they are; how much cleaner and more elegant the meshes are, how detailed the textures are, and how well they stand up, overall, when viewed today. I mean this as no criticism of the Wing2 artists; they worked with the technology they had and the end result of their work was fantastic, but the raw material is quite raw. On the other hand, Privateer's models are elegant both in presentation and in construction, sometimes to an almost absurd extent: serial numbers on the Tarsus that are impossible to see in the final game, cockpits that still look beautiful when rendered up to 250% their in-game size (and could no doubt be even larger if not for the limitations of 1993) - I'm not sure if it would stand up 'a hundred times', but clearly the people who made this were detail-mad; they could have looked at Wing2's models and decided "good enough", and the game wouldn't look any worse.

I'm not sure what the impetus behind this was - did the design staff seriously believe (as I sometimes hear) that the game would end up much more advanced than it actually was, and thus strive to make everything as perfect as possible? Or is this case, as sometimes happens, of a true craftsman, hand-modeling rivets in the airplane cockpit no one will ever see? Perhaps it's silly to ask this last part - after all, the man being remembered here built a giant spaceship model for kicks and impressed everyone so much that, of all the people who have ever worked at Origin excepting perhaps Garriot, this is the one story that I've had passed down to me independently.

In the end, I guess, I can't remember Brian Smith so much as a man - although reading his accomplishments fills me with wonder and envy - nor even so much as a game creator, for it is one of my sad secrets that of all the Wing Commander games and spin-offs Privateer has received some of the least attention. I can, however, definitely respect and admire him in the highest caliber in his profession, one that I aspire to myself - that of an artist. I've seen a lot of 3D spaceships in my time, and many of them are beautiful, arguably more beautiful than those of fourteen years ago - but a few nights ago, when I wanted to examine a model to see how a certain detail was done in hopes of emulating it, it wasn't any of those that sprang to mind.

Perhaps I'll go see if I can learn something from it now.

 

[AD]

It's late and I'm too tired at the moment to put together any sort of truly coherent memorial passage, but - while I never met the man, don't know how he died and the manner of his death, and thus can't say I feel remorse - reading through the accomplishments in his obituary, and in particular the giant spaceship model in the background of his picture, does leave a tinge of regret.

For the most part, I find your sentiment true to most of us, but remorse? Remorse implies guilt. How can you feel remorse over how a man you never knew died? It's not as if he died because we didn't like privateer enough. It may be beside the issue of the thread, but that seems like a very odd statement to open with, if not insulting. Maybe you're thinking of a different word.

 

[LeHah]

Sadly, the Privateer games are the only ones Ive never been able to get to work on any of my PCs. Don't ask me why, its really a mix of bad luck and an inability to run DOSBox lately.

However, I did know Brian through Crackdown, a game forever remebered as "that thing packaged with the Halo 3 Beta". An unfair assumption as Crackdown was a colorful, fun game. In fact, as far as random Xbox 360 games I've picked up, Crackdown was the one that surprised me the most.

I'd like to think that those vibrant colors and advanced cell shading graphics were helped immensely by his hand. Lord knows I'll never play that game again without thinking about him.

 

[Bob McDob]

How can you feel remorse over how a man you never knew died?

I was very tired when I wrote my post and wasn't really paying attention to vocabulary or grammar when I put it together. Still, I'm not sure what other word could have been used that expresses the concise feeling without need for explanation. The actual word that came to mind was "saddened" or "grieved," but that seemed too provocotive-sounding and callous for a memorial post.

Still, I don't, and can't, feel saddened by his death. His obituary reads that he died "suddenly," but suddenly to who? His friends, his family; but what about the man himself? All that's clear is that he was sick for some time and died of a heart attack. How he spent the intervening time isn't known. Knowing so little I couldn't possibly act grieved when he quite possibly faced death in a dignified manner and died on his own terms; it would be demeaning to him. Brian Smith accomplished more in fifty years than most of us could do in a hundred, and his legacy is an extraordinary body of work beautiful in function as well as form. That deserves admiration, not sadness. I can't imagine having many regrets for a life like he had.

That, I suppose, conveys more of what I intended to.