Valorant’s new skin line turns your gun into a cyberpunk sticker book

Riot’s shooter Valorant hasn’t been out long, but it’s now recognized for its distinctive character designs and weapon peels. Recently, that’s included a smart German hacker with charming robots, and guns that convert into dragons. Now the developer has unveiled its “glitch pop” skin line, which turns your weaponry into cyberpunk sticker books.

The name says it all: all the weaponry skins have a glitchy look out of a far-out dystopia but with dazzling colors to liven them up. A big selection of stickers adds more character, giving the guns the feel of a DJ’s laptop. The weapons can also be wrecked up to earn different color designs, sound effects, and even a holographic projector.

“Glitchpop was an occasion for us to take thought from the cyberpunk genre with our own fresh take on it,” says Chris Stone, senior weapons artist on Valorant. “There are so many marvelous illustrations of the cyberpunk class so we didn’t want to lean too heavily towards any one of them. We decided to focus on how to push this skin line towards more fun and punk aesthetic, instead of the classic morose and grounded cyberpunk illustration we often see.”

According to Sean Bigham, a senior notion artist on the game, the scheme started by accident. The art team was working on a different skin line, and one of the artists misinterpreted the design claim. The result was something the team initially called “megapunk.”