Dead End Thrills makes beautiful pictures from games

Computer games may or may not be art - the debate continues to rage. But Duncan Harris, through his website Dead End Thrills, has been turning game imagery into something that, if it's not art, is certainly beautiful to look at.

He uses tweaks, tricks, modifications and add-ons to warp, shift and prettify the worlds the games depict, with stunning results.

All pictures are the product of, and copyright of Dead End Thrills.

The site describes its MO as follows:

Applying the principles of real world photography to the virtual worlds of games is just part of the solution. Hacking and tweaking games to remove player model, HUD and restrictions on the camera are others. The toughest, though, is rendering games from throughout the 3D era, from Deus Ex to Crysis 2, at truly uncompromising quality. There is a massive difference between running a game with top-of-the-line antialiasing and quality settings, and running it with those same settings at resolutions far in excess today's norms, using offline resampling to achieve perfect results. Only recently, and after extensive research, have such methods become possible.

The image at the top of this post is of the city in EA's Mirror's Edge, while the one directly above depicts, in spectacular clarity, the control tower of Liberty City's airport in Grand Theft Auto: IV.

There's much more to be found in the site's archives. There are morbidly entertaining images from FEAR: First Encounter Assault Recon, aptly tagged 'monstrous'. There are some rather lovely images from various games under the 'mother nature' tag. And there are some that just look wonderful, such as the below, from Alice: Madness Returns, tagged 'skyblue' (look out for our Alice review soon).

All pictures are the product of, and copyright of Dead End Thrills. Thanks to Metafilter for bringing the site to our attention.