Viktor Antonov

Viktor Antonov (Sofia, 5 February 1972 – 7 February 2025) was a Bulgarian artist, video game designer, writer and worldbuilder, best known for designing the urban settings of many first-person shooters. His work matters because he gave fictional cities a convincing, coherent architecture that shapes the atmosphere and the way players move through a game.

Before turning to games he studied design at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he earned a degree in transportation design. His first job in the industry was at Xatrix Entertainment, where he painted the maps for Redneck Rampage (1997) and worked as a level designer on Kingpin: Life of Crime (1999). In 1999 he joined Valve, where he was art director of Half-Life 2 (2004). There he designed City 17, a decaying Eastern European city with Soviet-era Brutalist buildings and alien structures built like panopticons for the Combine's surveillance state. He later worked at Arkane Studios on Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Dishonored, designing Dunwall, a labyrinthine city of Victorian and Gothic buildings with steampunk touches.

He later held design roles on several ZeniMax Media titles, including Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014), Fallout 4 (2015), Doom (2016) and Prey (2017). His legacy lies in treating the game world as a lived-in place, and City 17 and Dunwall are often cited among the finest settings ever made for video games. He also worked on films and wrote a graphic novel.