When we went into production on Trenched [editor's note: now Iron Brigade], we had a clear vision of the gameplay, but the art style hadn't been fully fleshed out. The big, heavy, open-top mechs were in place, but we felt they needed a lot more style so that they didn't feel generic. One of our concept artists at Double Fine, Razmig Mavlian, suggested that we use men’s magazines from the '40s and '50s as the basis for our heroes. He sent us tons of reference material, and it didn't take long for us to realize how awesome this was and what a great fit it would be for the game. Our lead artist, Geoff Soulis, took to this art style right away and fully embraced the manly aesthetic. It was an extremely manly embrace.

Those magazines have a lot of themes that feel very wrong and outdated when you look at them today. But we felt that we could focus on the sense of adventure, bravery, camaraderie, drinking, and good old-fashioned face-punching violence for Trenched. And there's also something really amazing about a man fighting for his life against a bunch of crazed snapping turtles, bats, or weasels.

Real Man

This magazine is the first one the players see when they fire up the game. It depicts the hero of Trenched, Frank Woodruff, being savagely run over by a tank in World War I. We really wanted to capture the ridiculous machismo of those magazines. Frank’s entire lower half is being crushed, but he’s barely grimacing, and he’s still managing to easily hold up the American flag so that it doesn’t touch the ground. You see this sense of over-the-top manliness in all of these magazine covers, and our very own Jeremy Natividad captured it perfectly here. We had to do this one several times to get it right, and in the end Tim Schafer himself had to model the perfect manly pose for us (below).