Beast of Burden: Concept art by Steven Kimura

When a player wins the Impossible Vocal Challenge in Rock Band 2, a special outfit - known as the Beast of Burden - is unlocked in the Metal Shop. Harmonix Artist Steven Kimura wanted this garment to represent what many consider to be the deepest, purest strain in the genre: Norwegian Black Metal.  “I took a lot of cues from Peter Beste’s photos of the Black Metal scene,” Kimura says, “But I didn’t want to just recreate something that already existed.  Rock Band is about generating this sort of fantasy around what it’s like to be in a band.  I wanted to make an outfit that a guy from a black metal band would want to wear.   Something he wouldn’t necessarily be able to pull off in real life, because I don’t think those guys have great sewing skills.”

Figure 1: Kimura's initial thumbnail

Kimura started out with a rough thumbnail of a singer draped in a caribou pelt, the skull of which fits snugly over the character’s own head.  “The antlers were a logical choice for a Black Metal singer,” he says, “but most important detail for me was the dangling hooves.”  

Figure 2: a more detailed view of the Beast in development

From the thumbnail, Kimura developed a more detailed illustration that skewed darker.  “You can see that now he’s got that black metal beard, and he looks a little more upset.”  At this point Kimura had to make decisions about how the various components of the outfit could be removed and combined with other articles in a character’s closet.  “You can see that the caribou head is actually, um, a hat, and the rest of the pelt qualifies as a shirt.  So you could conceivably have a guy with the deer head, a T-shirt, and shorts.”

Figure 3: An in-progress color illustration by Eliot Min

Artist Eliot Min then prepared a more meticulous rendering of the Beast so that an orthographic model (a map that brings the two-dimensional artwork to life as a three-dimensional character) could be generated.  Kimura made some final adjustments - “I went in and inverted the bird hanging from his chest because so much of the Black Metal iconography involves the inverted cross – obviously we didn’t want to get into any religious imagery in the game, but this upside-down bird has a similar effect.  And I thought the boots could be a little more metal.”

Figure 4: The orthographic model for the Beast of Burden

You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you if you want to check out the final Beast of Burden outfit.  But cracking the Impossible Vocal Challenge in Rock Band 2 is a small price to pay for the privilege of wearing a fetid, fanged caribou corpse on stage in front of thousands of fans.