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Angelmapper

Surfing over the internet you suddenly see the extremely beautiful maps of Rachel Cordone. She has released several maps for Unreal Tournament and other games, and did that with great success. Her detailed and original artwork were noticed by the studio Secret Level, where she works at the moment. Time for some questions to Rachel - alias Angelmapper.

"I remember that I wanted to work with videogames when I was just a little girl and finished Super Mario Bros 2", tells the 24 year old Rachel. "I spent hours upon hours drawing new levels. When Half-life was released, I really started to design. In 2000 I started trying to work with the editor of Unreal Tournament. I could, however not work with the original Unreal Editor and since then I used the Unreal Engine itself." The American gets the inspiration for her artwork among other things from books about architecture. "The photo of the TGV station in Lyon for example, was the inspiration for CTF-Catherine for UT99", she tells.  "Moreover I get a lot of inspiration from the philosophy behind the Myst series. For the rest, I create my own ideas. I never take lay-out ideas from other games. I look only at mods and themes I like".

Passion
Since 2000, Rachel has her own website (www.angelmapper.com) with an overview of her artwork. With this site she tried to get a job in the game industry and she succeded. "Last year I was hired by a studio as an artist.", she tells. At the moment she works at Secret Level, a 3d developer, known for games like Star Wars and Starfighter. She developes a yet unknown PS2 game which will use the Unreal engine. Moreover she is busy creating a mod for UT2004. "I build everything myself for that mod: coding, characters and levels", Rachel tells. "It's very good to have that kind of freedom". Rachel clearly has a lot of passion for her work and that shows in the result. How does the future look? "I'm only waiting for the real Star Trek Holodecks, but I don't think anything like that will happen in the near future", she says (laughing/smiling) "I don't really have any wishes for the future for myself. I'm exactly where I want to be at the moment. Not everybody gets the chance to make their work out of their passion!"

Written by Inge de Brouwer