Flashboy Max

Flashboy Max; Superking and the Quest for Pandora

In a videogame world, there’s a cyborg called Max who used to be the best Flashboy in the Simulation, until his headset was stolen. As a manipulator of the code, Max’s skills are in demand. The Flashboy is recruited by a mysterious mechanical woman called Violet and an avatar, known as Rieker. Their mission spans the real and virtual world: with mecha fights in the mountains, a heist in the National Cemetery and an ultra challenging boss fight in the simulated resort known as New South World. Max discovers a digital footprint, made by rogue artificial intelligences, that reveals he has unwittingly been part of a much bigger game all along. New game? Continue? A thrilling Cyberpunk adventure that starts on the boss level and escalates from there!

Written and illustrated by Natalie Knowles, this story has been over ten years in the making. The original concept art below was created in Paint and Powerpoint in 2009. This low-spec approach to the image-making really enhanced the retro videogame aesthetic of the artwork which I don’t think contemporary graphics software would capture as faithfully.