I’d play all the fake games Valve made up for the Steam Summer Sale

I swear I saw the logo for Small Claims Court and just thought, yeah, that seems like an indie game. Turns out it wasn’t, it was one of several pieces of “fake game art” created by Valve artist Claire Hummel as part of the Steam summer sale. Now that the sale is over, Hummel shared all of the made-up key art on Twitter, and it’s all great.

HEYYY the Steam Summer Sale has concluded, so I can finally share all of the fake game art I got to make for it! 😎👍🏼

The idea for this sale was to design a bunch of relatively convincing key art to hide in the Steam storefront, all of which were a little weird on second glance: pic.twitter.com/iMQPT83yi5

— Claire Hummel (@shoomlah) July 7, 2022

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If you didn’t notice, this year’s Steam summer sale was partnered with a mini-game run by Clorthax, a time-traveller who had reportedly stolen ten games from the future. Taking part in the mini-game presented you with clues which you could then use to track down the made-up future games. So a clue like “Sport is the angle / The bait the allure / Success the disease / And you are the cure” might have led you to find Bass Ain’t Bitin’ 2022 in the Sports game category of the sale.

“Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton came up with the names/descriptions for Clorthax’s fake games, and then I just tried to match their energy in the final art. Super fun trying to make plausibly polished logos in a whole bunch of different styles/genres,” writes Hummels in the thread linked above. Clicking through will take you to the artwork for all ten.

My favourite of the bunch is The Consecration Of Esthme, which just looks perfectly like a game I would have reviewed in around 2012. It’s also the only game of the ten I absolutely would not play today.