Half of the skins in the new Inferno and Nuke collections are made by Valve, the other half
by 3 lucky community members, who kindly spoke with me about their designs. I didn’t want
Valve to feel left out so I offered to interview them as well, but they politely… didn’t.
These collections have been in development since last year, so it’s not like a last-minute
addition or anything like that. There was a lot of back and forth between the skin makers
and Valve and plans, designs and colours changed numerous times during this period.
Kosear worked on 5 of the skins from the Inferno collection, while Nuke contains 2 from Millennia
and 12 from Chemical Alia. I assume Valve must have liked Kosear’s
Roll Cage Famas design, firstly because they picked it back then, and second because they
wanted him to make more with a similar rally and old car theme. More specifically, they
gave him the task of creating skins with a ‘retro Italian racing style’.
Believe it or not, Kosear isn’t a big fan of motorsports! But his mind immediately went
to the Lancia- and not ‘Lancia’ as Jeremy Clarkson pronounces it! Any way, Lancia was
a relatively small Italian company that scored victories against the Audi Quattro, a formidable
4-wheel drive vehicle. If any of you have watched season 2 of The Grand Tour, you may
have seen the episode where Jeremy Clarkson talks about the rivalry between the 2 companies
and the under-hand tactics they used to get the upper-hand in rallies. It was my favourite
bit of the series and I totally understand Kosear getting his inspiration from it.
So he got to work on the SG553 and Dual Berettas, which were meant to be a higher quality than
the rest. He based the SG553 off of the Martini Racing colours. And with the dualies he used
the colour scheme from this vehicle. Kosear explained the difficulty of remaining
faithful to the liveries, but without plagiarising. He had to change the logos and company names,
but he knew that if he changed them too much then the weapons would end up looking like
a cheap Chinese rip-off of the vehicles in question. This would do more to upset fans
of rallying than it would to please them. It was a balancing act that he spent a long
time on. At one point Valve also asked him to remove the word TURBO from the design,
but he explained that it was from a car feature rather than a company’s logo and ultimately,
it was allowed to remain. The number 25 on the handle was not accidental.
It was chosen so that, if reflected on the other side of the gun, it would still read
‘25’. How about that. He also had to design 3 patterns that could
be applied to any weapon. He had a lot more flexibility with these than he did with the
specific weapon skins… but if anything, he found this harder. How could he portray
a retro Italian rally theme in a PATTERN? Also, being for lower skin qualities, they
had to be a little less flashy than his other designs. He made 5-10 different patterns,
but felt they would fall short of Valve’s expectations. He really did struggle to come
up with anything that he was happy with. It was a month or so before he got back to
Valve, during which time he feared he might have been too late and that other people may
have been asked to create skins instead. He apologetically wrote back to them, sorry that
he didn’t feel he had done the task asked of him. This was the first time in his life
that he had failed to think of a design! He was met with silence, and his concerns grew.
Later, he proposed that he created a skin instead of a pattern.
And Valve said that was a good idea. He had to create a Mac10, P250 and SSG08 design.
He started with the Mac10, which he sent off to Valve- all they asked him to do was to
change the sticker to an Inferno logo. And then he made the others as well. You’ll
notice a checkered pattern on these- this is a reference to the glove skin, ‘DRIVER
GLOVES’, which he thinks would go nicely in conjunction with these weapons.
He’d like to thank Valve and Daniel Boutwell for this opportunity and for taking the time
to reply even at unusual times outside of work hours. He hopes the guys at Valve aren’t
disappointed in him for not being able to think up the patterns- his thinking was that
the patterns would be applied to the rest of the skins in the collection and so his
failure to think them up burdened Valve with extra work. Having seen the collection, he’s
kind of pleased that the MP7 Fade and Bizon Candy Apple were featured as he likes those
styles. Over in the Nuke collection, Millenia was
given quite a bit of freedom to decide what to do with the M4A1-S and Tec9. He talked
with Valve about doing Bond-style gadgets, filled with buttons and features. In a bit
of a coincidence, he also turned to cars for inspiration, looking through the older Bond
movies as he liked that era’s style of CRTs and monochrome LCD’s.
This went through quite a bit of back and forth between him and Valve. He found the
experience a positive one, saying that the feedback and suggestions helped a lot. He
learned from this experience that you shouldn’t draw stuff on a weapon that should be dynamic,
such as ammo counters. At one point his M4 featured a radar gadget, which he removed
for that precise reason and because it alluded to being a gameplay device of sorts.
Knowing that these skins would make it into the game, he concentrated his time on these
and made them extra special. He said additional effort was easy to justify when he knew they’d
be featured! Not that he knew what these skins would be
for. He assumed it would be for an operation or something. By chance, he investigated the
control panels on Nuke for inspiration… before even knowing it was for a Nuke collection!
You can see Nuke’s influence on the M4 in particular. The suppressor on this weapon
was borrowed from his Triton USP-S skin. He said it fit the style, so why reinvent the
wheel? Chemical Alia worked on the patterns for the
Nuke collection. This means that she can take credit for… Random Access, Co-processor,
Facility Negative, Exchanger, Motherboard, Mainframe, Bulkhead, Facility Draft, Coolant,
Facility Dark, Facility Sketch and Mandrel. That’s 12 skins- 2 thirds of the Nuke collection!
She didn’t know what her designs would be used for. The original theme was ‘secret
agent’ but after struggling to think up patterns for it, Valve suggested a new theme:
nuclear powerplants. I WONDER WHAT THAT COULD BE FOR! With this new plan she got to work
researching iconic imagery that people would associate with nuclear powerplants, and then
found a style that complemented a repeated pattern and limited colour scheme. She didn’t
know which weapons these patterns would be used on, but since patterns are generally
reserved for lower tiered skins, she kept the colours muted in most of the designs but
threw in a few patterns with more vibrancy. For each pattern she submitted 3-4 colour
variations to Valve. When you submit a pattern texture, you separate
it into 4 different colours, so you have RED, GREEN, BLUE and ALPHA, which is normally used
for glossiness or wear. This is when Valve took over, deciding which skins should be
used on which weapons, and even what colour the pattern should be- which in some cases
was different from the designs originally submitted.
You can view the collections in their entirety in the videos I’ve already released where
I briefly talk about each of the designs. Thank you to Kosear, Millenia and Chemical
Alia for taking the time to talk to me, and Valve for being cool with it.