Something Good #110: Viktor, the World Builder
In memory of Viktor Antonov (1972-2025).
The phone rang a few weeks ago with terrible, shocking news: Viktor Antonov had died. It had only been a few months since I’d last seen Viktor, on a trip where the man had been in fine form, photographing everything in sight, encountering random celebrities, drinking fine wine. The news made me feel unhinged, like the universe was trembling around me. A friend was gone, and in his place there was now something huge and immovable, a permanent absence.
You may not know his name, but Viktor was a legendary art director whose vision shaped some of the most innovative video games of the century, if not all time—Half-Life 2 and Dishonoured to name just a couple. His work had been a deep influence on me for years before we’d ever met. I still remember the first time I played Half-Life 2, set in a mysterious, Eastern European urban landscape known as “City 17,” inspired by the Communist Bulgaria of Viktor’s upbringing and the fringier elements of his adopted Paris.1
The game takes place an indeterminate number of years after the first Half-Life—probably decades?—which was set, more or less, in our own world (albeit one where a laboratory experiment gone wrong causes an incursion from another dimension). Now, the world is under occupation by an otherworldly power known as The Combine; the conflict begun in the first game has been long since fought and lost.2
Coming from the first game, or even starting it without having played the original,you feel like you’ve awakened into a nightmare. No explanatory text or helpful backstory guide explains where you are or what is going on.
No guide, that is, except the environments themselves. All you really know is that you are in City 17, probably somewhere in Eastern Europe. Its urban landscapes create a stifling atmosphere of bureaucracy and total surveillance that is still recognizably ours, its authoritarian incursions encrusted on old buildings, town squares, billboards. You’re usually looking at multiple eras of architecture, urban design and technology all at once, and this overlapping felt so new and original at the time. It still does.
The game never stops for animated cinematics or other devices that take away the player’s control to push along the narrative. I’d never realized a story could be told so ambiently before. It must have taken a tremendous amount of confidence to trust that players would feel so much more connected to the story if they had to wonder about it themselves than if it had been shoved down their throats. It still colours how I write, for games and everything else that I do.
When I learned I would be working with Viktor some years ago, I was awed and star-struck and more than a little anxious. But from our first phone call, Viktor charmed me with his courtesy and humility. Before I could explain who I was and what right I had to be there, he had introduced himself and his CV as if he was just another colleague. This was something I saw again and again whenever he would be introduced to a new collaborator. Despite the fact that younger artists reacted in his presence as if he was a god, he never used his reputation to gain the upper hand or dominate the conversation. Even if we all knew we were in the presence of a genius.
This is not to say he wasn’t a strong personality, deeply opinionated, and usually right. His notes were sharp and specific, whether he was critiquing the shape of a cheekbone or the type of mortar that might be used to build an imaginary warehouse. But he was never intransigent; he was always gracious about disagreements and willing to change his mind. Looking back, I hope the same could be said about me in our interactions.
His mind, and Paris apartment, which I always saw from one particular, dim angle in our video calls, were both storehouses of references: obscure architectural drawings, art and design texts, urbanist history. He derived inspiration from everywhere, never content to seek his references in other video games, something we both felt strongly about. In this medium that has the potential to incorporate so many art forms, why not bring in as much new DNA as possible? I felt a deep connection to this philosophy of constant synthesis and discovery.
His recommendations were always fascinating or unexpected, whether it was an obscure Wim Wenders film noir or the John Singer Sargent room at the Met. I remember suggesting Lucy Sante’s Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York to him, and getting a special thrill from the fact that he hadn’t heard of it, and even more when he told me later that he loved it.
As a teenager, Viktor escaped from Bulgaria to France, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. His persona emerged from those cultures, with a twist of his own Jewish heritage. He was unspeakably intelligent, funny, absent-minded, intense. We bonded over books and art we loved, in particular Christopher Priest’s Inverted World, which he was working on adapting; I’m so sad the world will never see this project.
In person, he was a magnificently shambling giant, stalking the boulevards clad always in black, with a long, worn trench coat and an expensive Swiss watch. He could send a bottle of wine back at an expensive Las Vegas restaurant with perfect authority and courtesy. Sommeliers would cower in his presence, because they always knew he was right.
I am probably not alone in having so many stories about him. He somehow knew everybody. At a dinner with him at yet another fancy restaurant, he casually remarked that he had eaten at the very table we were sitting at just two days before (an evening when he had, I remembered, mysteriously disappeared). “Oh yes,” he said. “I was having dinner with The Rock.”
There was so much I learned from him, but this is what I want to keep. Viktor had to understand everything about how a world worked before he could build it. No matter how fantastical or otherworldly it was, he had to see its logic. You could present him with some crazy idea for an in-game environment and he’d be full of questions: when was it built? Who built it? What’s the history of the neighbourhood, who immigrated there and when? You want some pipes going up the side of the building; great, but what are they for and where do they go? (He hated A.I. imagery for all its meaningless details, impressive on the surface but lacking any logic or motivation.)
This is how you create an imaginary world that is coherent and resonant and lives in people’s minds forever: by asking questions. The weirder the world, the more questions there are, even—especially—if the answers are never exposed to the player or the audience.
But you have to always keep asking.
In memory of Viktor Antonov, 1972-2025
If you want to see and hear Viktor, and take a peek at his famous apartment, I recommend this Half-Life 2 anniversary document, released late last year, and particularly its opening sequence, which follows Viktor on a walk around Austerlitz station. (It’s a strange coincidence that two of the most brilliant people I’ve ever been privileged to know, both lost far too young, were both urban explorers.)
Bonus track:
I don’t remember where I found this #nojacketsrequired sample… but I like it. Send me your own and if I run it, I may send you a special treat.
I brought a disposable waterproof film camera on vacation a little while ago. The casing cracked, and before I’d realized it, the camera body had been infiltrated by sea water. The results pleased me.
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