Recon Helmet Revealed

Fight Like a Girl wouldn’t be possible with the hard work and dedication of individuals and companies. This year Clash has generously donated a replica Recon helmet to be awarded to the winner of the Firefight solo tournament. We spoke with Cynn (follow him on twitter) and Allday briefly about Clash, their new studio and the Recon helmet.

FLAG: What is the Clash Company?

Cynn: If you take equal parts of a political movement, a vagabond carnival and a guild of Victorian oil painters… You’d have something pretty far off base of what Clash is. We are a group of game players and theorists who take competition very seriously. Clash was established in 2003 and served as the official online tournament executor for the Halo Trilogy working directly with Microsoft. Since then we’ve collaborated with all sorts of developers and publishers on events and have recently teamed up with some amazing artists to create the Recon Helmets donated to FLAG. We are calling this new studio “Lake Titan”. We hope to continue making new things around the industry so if anyone needs a game brought to life then let us know!

FLAG: When did you first become a fan of Halo?

Allday: One fateful Friday night, a few friends mentioned they were heading to a LAN and invited me. Turns out I end up at a friend’s house that I typically would not have thought a gamer.

He was running cords everywhere to hook up four Xboxes complete with original Duke controllers. I watched a few rounds and thought to myself, finally, something worthy to move to after Goldeneye. After an all weekend multiplayer session, I went and bought my own Xbox and Halo and thoroughly enjoyed the campaign.  After some people failed to show with their system the next weekend, we were down a box. It was a terrible situation I never wanted to be in again, and that soon led to owning 4 systems and copies of the game. You just couldn’t run the risk of not being able to play if people gathered.

Cynn: I’ll never forget when Halo snagged me. My dropship had just crashed and everyone was dead but me. I slowly made my way up a small hill and got a view of a wonderful looking playground full of strange ruins, alien wonders and cigar chewing marines doing their best to trash said beautiful distractions. The second Echo 419 dropped in the Warthog I was sold. “Well, I don’t care if it’s God’s own anti-son-of-a-bitch machine or a giant hula hoop, we’re not gonna let ‘em have it! What we will let ‘em have is a belly full of lead  and a pool of their own blood to drown in! Am I right, Marines?” Sarge is never wrong.

Clash's Recon Helmet in all its glory.

FLAG: How did you come to creating armor replicas?

Allday: I had done film and art in college while playing video games the whole time, this seemed like the perfect way to merge them.

FLAG: Have you created replicas of other games? Is there a particular game that you’d like to try your hand at some day?

Allday: I have been fortunate to have worked with some extremely talented artists on some amazing projects such as the T.M.D. for Singularity and the Big Daddy from Bioshock. I would love to give life to some of the amazing creatures and armor from Dark Souls, Fullgore from Killer Instinct and a fully leveled up Peacekeeper from Crackdown 2.

Cynn: Forget games, I’d like to make some armor for Seattle Superhero, Phoenix Jones! The only conflict would be the disapproval of my fellow supervillains… OK, forget Jones let’s go with Battlefield 2142. I love the way the art design tightropes between futuristic and today’s technology. I’d also love to see Sonic Team’s Burning Rangers, StarHawk and Half Life on the work table. Maybe Crimson Skies… Mechwarrior… Crysis!

A side view of the Recon helmet.

FLAG: Where did you get the skills to create these replicas, is this something you learned through your trade? How long did it take for you to get the result to match your expectations?

Allday: This team is a small group of self taught artists. We decided to use our skills learned over the years and pool them together to achieve a great system of creation.

Cynn: The team is awesome but nothing ever really leaves the studio that they don’t want to keep working on. These guys wouldn’t be satisfied even if projects shipped with working energy shields!

FLAG: Take us through the process of creating one of these pieces.

Allday: We start out with a character or IP we love. From there we choose something that is recognizable and important to the games mythos and its fans. We then sculpt the items from scratch and apply mold to make a copy of the original sculpt.  Finally we fix any imperfections and paint them to be accurate to the game. More complex productions may also include custom lighting, sound systems and small modifications for comfort. It’s hard work but very enjoyable to create something you love from raw materials.