Zebo. The Zaxxon Boss

Zebo. The Zaxxon Boss
3600x1200 Image
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The 80s holds several sci-fi icons in my head. The Tron Recognizer, Maximillian from the Black hole, and the first video game I have ever fought-The Zaxxon Boss.

I was fascinated by comic books when I was a kid and I spent many afternoons wasting paper inventing and doodling superheroes. As time passed by, my skills in illustration got better and I started carrying around a Moleskin to keep my illustrations.

Eventually, the realities of my computer science studies took away the time for me to draw. I stopped illustrating for a long, long time and my skills has considerably waned. As of right now, I have a small fraction of skills as I used to have when I was in college.

On the other hand, I fell in love with programming and eventually I attempted to mix the two. It is a little bit sad to say that I feel more comfortable putting polygons together in a program than it is to pick up a pencil and draw. To that effect, I decided to draw together three of the coolest robots I have known in the 80s.

The Tron Recognizer was one of those vehicles/robots where the visage just strikes me. It just looks so unusual. Their role in the Tron movie was also somewhat mysterious. Maybe it is that mystery that fascinates me about them.

Maximillian was just one of those scary robots that really freaked me out when I was a kid. That scene in The Black Hole where he skewered a man was one of the first times I remember where I covered my eyes while watching a movie. Nonetheless, I liked him because he was just so menacing. Not to mention he looks like one of those Star Wars Imperial Royal Guards. Anything Star Wars is a bonus in my book.

Then there's this homage to 1950s sci-fi robots. I don't even have a name for it. I just call him the Zaxxon Boss. Zebo for short. I have many fond memories of me piloting my spaceship on this faux 3D plane and shooting this annoying boss of a monster down. Of course, you didn't really shoot him directly. You aim for that heat-seeking rocket that he is powering up to launch at you. Nevertheless, the funky design of this robot left an impression on me. He just looked weird and memorable.

So I decided to create some polygon models of these three and combine them in an image. The original backstory of the image can be found on its Flickr page:

Zebo, the Zaxxon boss, has decided to get even with that pesky rocketship that destroyed his interstellar bachelor's pad in the 1980s.

After investing in Google stock, he has decided it is time to get even. With his gang of friends from the 80's, he has arrived to wreak vengeance on those folks that played Zaxxon and blew him up to smithereens.

The imagery is supposed to portray Zebo as a gigantic general-type leaderbot with Maximillians as his field commanders and the Recognizers as the infantry.

I had a lot of fun creating this image. It took a lot of time since it is polygon-based but it was certainly worth the 30+ hours coding every polygon vertex on it. I still have the master files on this so I might revisit the models at a later time and create even more images.

In the meantime, enjoy the 3600x1200 image.