Custom MGS shoes

While Icrontic was at E3 this past June, I was taking photos for the Shoes of E3 article. As I was photographing a particular pair of pink polka-dot heels, the girl’s boyfriend mentioned that he had custom-painted a pair of Castle Crashers-themed heels. His name is Jacob Patterson, and I recently had a chance to interview him about video game-themed shoes.

Jacob is an art history student at UCLA. I asked him how an art history major gets into nitty-gritty design work. He let me in on a dark little secret: Since it was so competitive, he felt that there was no way to get into UCLA design school. “I chose art history because nobody wants to do it,” he chuckled.

But why choose shoes as his canvas instead of traditional medium?

Jacob answers, “In high school everyone was obsessed with shoes, so I started looking into Hypebeast and Customsnkr.” He found a lot of things he wanted to try out, but could never find any explanation of how the shoes were done, or detailed step-by-step instructions.

Another obstacle was the expense of the medium. Shoes can be $100 a pair, after all. It’s not exactly easy for a high school kid, on high school income, to get into something like this. After some false starts, however, he made a video documenting the process. “I put it on YouTube,” he explains, “and got featured for ‘Best Christmas present ever’.”

That’s when the floodgates opened.The next day, he had thousands of emails.

“I had always wanted to get into art as a career. My love of design and video games went hand-in-hand.” With his instant overnight success on YouTube, he began to see that maybe this was something he could make a career out of. He started to become aware of the challenges that were facing him. “In the video game art world, it’s very hard to do what you want to do; you always do what people tell you to do.”

Still, he wanted to forge his own way. He started thinking of something he could do that would set him apart.

Enter Solid Snake

That’s when he embarked on his Metal Gear shoe project. “I couldn’t think of a better video game series to do than Metal Gear. The story and scale were very inspirational to me.”

He made the shoes, and got noticed by the PR team from Konami. What Jacob didn’t know was that they had forwarded pictures of the shoes to Hideo Kojima himself.

Hideo Kojima and Jacob Patterson

Jacob made his way to E3, and was invited to the Konami press conference. He brought the shoes. Even though he had been invited, the guards would not let him in. All he had was the PR representative’s first name. As a last ditch effort, he shouted into the room behind the guards, “Jay!” and held up the shoes.

“Jay” turned and saw him, came up quickly and told the guards to let him in. That’s when things started going right.

The VP of Konami overheard and came up to Jacob and said “People have been talking about these shoes,” and handed him his card. Then he finally got to meet Hideo Kojima himself. Kojima complimented him on his work and autographed the shoes.

The success of conferences can be measured in the networking opportunities for people like Jacob, who want to make a living in the video game world. By that measure, E3 2009 was a giant success for Jacob.

The next place to look for Jacob is going to be Newgrounds, where Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin (of The Behemoth fame), have contacted Jacob to do something commemorative for upcoming changes to the Newgrounds website.

Follow Jacob’s work at YouTube, Myspace, and Twitter.

Castle Crashers heels by Jacob