Working for Blizzard: A childhood passion turned reality
Video game artist at Blizzard Entertainment, Luke Mancini, realised that illustration and game design were where his passion lay after completing a trip to Prato as part of his Bachelor of Visual Design course.
A fleet of heavily armoured Terran space marines swoop on a barren planet. Within minutes, they’re under attack. It’s the Zerg. Wave after wave of the grotesque alien insectoid army swarms the humans in a frenzied bid to assimilate them out of existence. All seems lost, but then a squad of technologically advanced Protoss warriors warp into view. Suddenly, a third battlefront opens.
Phew! Another day at the office for Luke Mancini.
The 33-year-old game concept artist started working for Californian game developer Blizzard Entertainment in 2009, where the characters above form part of the StarCraft universe, one of Blizzard’s most popular online multiplayer titles, along with World of Warcraft, Diablo and Heroes of the Storm.
“I’ve been into drawing since I was tiny,” says Mancini from his home in Lake Forest, midway between Los Angeles and San Diego. “I’ve got photos of me when I was three or four just scribbling away, and my parents have stacks of art that they kept over the years.”
Mancini grew up in Daylesford with his sister Hanna (also an artist), their “arty” mother Terttu, and freelance graphic designer father Rob. While dinosaurs and robots were staple themes for the young Mancini, his imagination was further fuelled on the family Mac by a real-time strategy title called – you guessed it – StarCraft.
“I had got a demo before it came out with one of those computer magazines, and I spent a year just playing these three missions over and over again,” he says.
Soon, teenage Mancini found friends who were into games such as Halo and Call of Duty, and they convinced their science teacher to install a variety of multiplayer titles on the school computers to play at lunchtime. “But StarCraft was the one that really stuck with me.”
Mancini did well in Year 12, and his first preference, Monash University, offered a full scholarship to study a Bachelor of Visual Design. A highlight was a five-week stint at Monash’s Prato campus, just outside Florence, Italy. “That was super-cool,” he says, adding that when tasked with making watercolours of the local town, he couldn’t help but sneak in an alien invasion. “I soon realised that illustration and game design was still where my passion was.”
The Italy trip also gave him the opportunity to visit a Blizzard convention coincidentally happening in Paris, where Mancini made some good network connections. Back in Australia, he became a prolific contributor of StarCraft illustrations to an online fan forum, and through that, in 2008, he was given free tickets to fly to a Blizzard convention in the US.
Eventually, his fan art caught the eye of Blizzard recruiters, who called him up for a phone interview and an ‘art test’. Mancini was given a month to come up with his own interpretation of three StarCraft races: a Terran, a Zerg and a Protoss. He must have done something right, because soon he found himself moving out of his family home to the other side of the world, to Irvine, California. Mancini had won the jackpot – getting paid to do something he loved.
Since marrying his (Sony PlayStation employee) wife Monica in 2016, the couple have had two young daughters, Genevieve and Adelaide. And, in between working, being a dad, and the odd Pokémon GO session while walking the family’s two dogs, you’ll find Mancini streaming online illustration tips and tricks to help aspiring artists and illustrators, like he used to be.
“Knowing how important that was to my creative road, I really try and give back,” he says.
(Featured banner image - StarCraft artwork courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment.)
