If you are into car culture, you might have come across the work of Khyzyl Saleem. Over on Twitter and Instagram, he has shared many outlandish, but cool, concept car renders with bespoke body kits.
He also spent five years at Ghost Games, working on the Need For Speed series. The wild-looking Polestar 1 that graced Need For Speed Heat’s cover? That was his handiwork.
In a recent interview with Carfection, Saleem shared the story of how he got the gig to work on the Need For Speed series.
“One day I went into work and I remember looking through my emails,” he recalled. “Oh this is one is from… EA Games.
“It was in my spam folder so I was like, this could very well not be a legitimate email and I very nearly just binned it off and didn’t bother reading it. Thankfully, I didn’t do that!”
Saleem’s role was for a concept artist, and while his expertise was creating outlandish concepts for car bodykits, his work scope during his stint at EA also covers more than that.
“The job surprised me a little, because I went in this thinking ‘oh yeah, you know, they’re getting me to design cars and I’ll do all these body kits and I’ll do these vehicle designs.’
“And they’re like, ‘yeah we’re get you to do environment art’.”
Saleem eventually got to put his wild, ridiculous and to some, cursed, bodykits into Need For Speed Heat. The Deluxe Edition bonus cars are dubbed “K.S.” Editions, a nod to Saleem’s handiwork.
At the end of his work contract, Saleem decided to leave the games industry. “Working [in games] is a very stressful environment. I didn’t realise that it was having the impact on me that it was. To the point that it was impacting me physically in the form of alopecia.”
Still, Saleem says he had a great time working at Ghost Games, citing it as “a very exciting period of my life”.
Saleem has now moved on, working on real-life project cars, bringing his outlandish concepts to reality. The most recent project is called the Porsche 365 Moby X- a wild take on the Moby Dick endurance race car.
Ghost Games has now gone defunct, with the Need For Speed series being handed over to Criterion Games.
It’s a shame that the games industry can’t retain such talents due to their work culture, but let’s be glad we were able to witness Saleem’s handiwork of blessed/cursed bodywork design only the Need For Speed series dared to embrace.