| Paul Owens Interviews Cory Schmitz |
| Monday, 25 July 2011 19:00 |
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Cory Schmitz creates original artwork inspired by videogames. His most recent project is a zine based on The Legend of Zelda, consisting of art, illustration, and literature submitted by fans of the venerable series.
 - Do you remember the first time you played a Zelda game? What was the experience like? Oh man... I can't remember! I think it was either A Link to the Past or Link's Awakening. Either way, both of those games had a pretty big impact on me. They presented such unique and grand visions of adventure. AND THAT MUSIC!
- How did the idea for a zine based on Zelda come about, or have you been waiting your whole life to do something like this? Actually, it was my friend Lee Nicholls' idea. He approached me about doing the branding for GameCity6 in Nottingham, and to put together a little Zelda Zine while I was over there for the festival's Zelda Takeover Day. Neither of us expected such a great response!
 - The Zelda zine has really gotten a lot of attention and praise. Were you surprised by that? Yes! Before the festival started we weren't sure how many submissions we'd get. Not only were the submissions we got awesome, but they surpassed our 32-page limit 4X! That's when the idea of doing three volumes (one for each part of the Triforce) came about. The response has been really great though, they haven't even been released to the general public yet and there's already so much buzz about it.
- It feels like in recent years, gamer culture has gotten a lot more sophisticated and your art has really been a part of that. What's been your perspective on that world? I am very happy to see gamer culture become more sophisticated! It is awesome and video games deserve to have a sophisticated culture.
 - Despite often being based on popular games, your art stands on its own as something original. When approaching a design, how do you keep the connection to the game while making it uniquely yours? I try to take imagery and symbols from games that I connect with and put a unique twist on them. I have a lot of design methods that I don't see too much in normal video game-related designs, so I like to think my game-related designs have a unique look and feel to them.
 - I was really surprised to see you had designed Uncharted 3 shirts for Sony (i'm also proud to have two of them in my closet). Despite it being such a huge property, you managed to retain your style. Was it difficult working with such a huge corporation to create something like that? Oh thanks! No not really actually! Arne Meyer is the best community manager ever, and he wanted my style to be a big part of those shirts. Those shirts were great fun, I could pretty much do anything I wanted as long as I used a couple specific colors and images, etc. They even let me use my own Uncharted 3 logo I made on the shirts! Most clients would never let something like that happen. The only bummer was that they were all really quick turnaround times. Super honored to have been able to do designs for such an amazing game!
- What can we expect to see from you in the future? More zines and logos and posters and stuff like that. Also, I am in Toronto from Nov-Feb working on something that's going to be really awesome. It's a secret though. I am really proud to be working on it. More info on that soon!
More of Cory's work can be found at http://coryschmitz.tumblr.com/
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