It’s been too long since we last had a Resistance game (and even longer since Sony released a first-party FPS). Feeling wistful for blastier times, I recently edited a piece about Resistance 3, the third and final mainline game in the series to date.
While I was putting the images in the article, I noticed something that I, and I’m sure many others, never did about the main art for Resistance 3: the “teeth” in the Chimera skull are actually New York buildings.
There’s the Statue of Liberty on the right, and then three more buildings to its left (maybe one of them is the Empire State, another is the Chrysler?) to its left to make five buildings in total.
Just to be sure that it wasn’t something unofficial that had crept onto Google Images, I checked my own physical copy of Resistance 3 on PS4, and yup: New York City buildings.
(Yes, I need to remove that CEX sticker, but it’s stuck on deep — gotta bust out the hairdryer.)
The significance of the New York skyline on the Resistance 3 cover is because the game depicts you as Corporal Joseph Capelli, who’s tasked with travelling to a now ruined New York to put a stop to the Chimera’s plans to open a wormhole and freeze the planet. Normal stuff, then.
The art even apparently influenced Insomniac to make a Resistance 3 Gamescom trailer in the same style, though it seems to have been taken down by Insomniac themselves. You can check it out from a secondary source below.
The subtle easter egg in the game’s cover art makes more sense when you realise that it was illustrated by Olly Moss, a well-known graphic artist who reimagined famous movie posters with tonnes of little details. In more recent times, he has worked on games like Firewatch and Half-Life: Alyx as an artist and designer. His work on posters for Mondo to celebrate the original Star Wars trilogy are close to iconic.
This September will mark eleven years since the release of Resistance 3, a game which I count as my personal favourite in the series, though I know not a lot of people agree with that. There’s something about it that just didn’t connect with many people at all and was actually a commercial failure, which is a real shame.
The story of retribution and the ghostly post-apocalypse were quite compelling, as well as the gunplay probably being the tightest in the series. Maybe it was the lack of real revolution, or the fact that main character Nathan Hale didn’t make a return, but Resistance 3 really just didn’t land with a wide audience.
Whatever the case, isn’t it about time we got a new Resistance game, Sony?
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