# Tsutomu Nihei

[_Blame!_](!W)
by
[Tsutomu Nihei](!W)
is my favorite manga.

## Contents

## What influenced _Blame!_ {#influences-on-blame}

### _Great Sky River_ and _Feersum Endjinn_

Two English-language science fiction novels.
[_Great Sky River_](!W "Great Sky River (novel)") (1987)
is by Gregory Benford,
and
[_Feersum Endjinn_](!W) (1994)
is by Iain M. Banks.
See
["Books that (could have) inspired BLAME!"](http://heeen.de/blame/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=62)
on heeen's _Blame!_ forum.

### H. R. Giger {#giger}

The influence,
especially through
[_Alien_](!W)
(1979),
is apparent.

### Zdzisław Beksiński {#beksinski}

Go to
[blameSphere 2.0](http://www.blamesphere.de/2.0/nihei.html)
and click "Inspiration".
You will see panels
(from the end of chapter 24, volume 4)
that directly reference Beksiński's
[untitled 1978 painting](https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdislav-beksinski/untitled-1978-1).
The painting depicts a field of buttes stretching to the horizon
with skeletal figures huddled around a fire atop each butte.
I noticed a lot of Beksiński in the color segment of chapter 19 of the same volume.

## Works influenced by Nihei {#influenced-by-nihei}

### _NaissanceE_ (2014)

An exploration video game for Windows.
Released on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/265690/NaissanceE/).

### Abandoned video game projects

#### bac9.tumblr.com

The project blog has some nice black-and-white 3D renders inspired by _Blame!_.
Updates were posted in 2014–2015.
The
[Introduction](https://bac9.tumblr.com/post/73649013336/introduction)
talks about what gives Nihei's architecture a sense of scale.

> So, few years ago I started by trying to copy some of his environments.
> It's not a very trivial task despite minimal style some of them are executed in.
> Even if some surface is composed from large plates with lots of white space,
> it still relies on sharp and tiny details to convey the sense of scale properly - human-sized doors, rust, leaks, power cables, staircases - they are always somewhere,
> and help a lot to give a clear visual difference between 10m high wall and 1km high wall.

#### _Megastructure_

[TIGSource Forums thread](https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=58577.0).
Updates were posted in 2016–2017.

## Page metadata

URL: <https://dbohdan.com/nihei.md>

Published 2020-04-14, updated 2024-01-31.

Tags:

- manga
- notes
- person

Index: [Notes and reviews](/notes).