HITTING THE SPOT
Cinematic effects studio Weta has been responsible for the visual punch of blockbusters from Lord of the Rings to Avatar and Mad Max. Now, it’s bringing its design expertise to the tabletop realm with GKR: Heavy Hitters. Senior concept designer Paul Tobin unleashes the Giant Killer Robots
Words by Matt Jarvis
Zombies. Pirates. Cowboys. Ninjas. Superheroes. Robots. From the tabletop to the silver screen, there are some things that never fail to get blood pumping and passions burning. How do you bring these ingredients for instant fandom to the boil? Make everything bigger and deadlier, of course.
Enter Giant Killer Robots: Heavy Hitters, the debut board game from Weta Workshop. While Weta’s name may be a stranger in the tabletop world, film fans will recognise the New Zealand design studio from its Oscar and BAFTA-winning visual effects work on mammoth blockbusters including the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, King Kong, Kong Ava tar, tar Mad Max: Fury Road and this year’s Ghost in the Shell. In other words, big, beautiful and deadly are Weta’s bread and butter. Still, jumping from multi-million-dollar movies to the comparatively tight-knit realm of tabletop gaming may seem a curious move for the distinguished outlet.
“We’ve worked on a lot of big films over the years,” acknowledges senior concept designer Paul Tobin, who co-created GKR: Heavy Hitters
with fellow Weta veterans Christian Pearce and Leri Greer. “We’re also all avid gamers. Leri and Christian are particularly big video game players. I’m a bit more old-school, I was kind of roleplaying games and a lot of board games, as well, and some tabletop miniature games for a little bit. So all of us have definitely had a strong interest in games, but we’ve never had the opportunity to work on a game of our own.”
Weta’s professional curiosity in game design had first been piqued during its past experience creating video game visuals. More recently, sculptor Johnny Fraser-Allen had collaborated with UK tabletop publisher River Horse to create the miniatures for the Labyrinth board game – building on Weta’s legacy of ‘bigatures’ (some of them measuring a staggering nine metres high) used on-screen in Lord of the Rings and King Kong. As in the company’s film work, the physical and digital worlds eventually collided.