All hail the king of Lich King cosplay

Arthas Menethil, Warcraft's Lich King, is not an easy guy to cosplay. For starters, those shoulderpads look like they'd crush your head if you so much as shrug. Then there's the sheer amount of armor involved, which can't be easy to walk around in let alone put together. But Russian cosplayer Aoki, with assistance from his partner in life as well as cosplay Nargas, went all out on it.

They first put together a version of this costume in 2016, but weren't happy with details like the chestplate, skulls, and general level of detail. So they continued updating it over the next year, and you can see the full process detailed on their blog. They made new chainmail out of steel rings (which took four weeks!), and a wider chest plate out of EVA foam and a Russian thermoplastic called BubbleStar. There were several rounds of recasting the armor pieces, and the whole thing apparently enjoyed several repaints. Pleather belts were replaced with leather ones, extra details were sculpted onto the shoulderpads with epoxy and they were sanded 100 times after that.

And while the original version had Aoki wielding the cursed sword Frostmourne, if you remember the very metal WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne end credits you'll recall that Arthas bears something different—a glowing blue electric guitar. So they made that instead.

This version of the cosplay (enhanced even more with a new wig and makeup that took almost two hours to apply) went on to win Best Large Fabrication at Blizzcon 2018. Aoki and Narga made a cute video about the process of turning him into Arthas, with a cameo by Narga in her own cosplay at the end.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.