I don’t have time to travel much, and New York City (where I live) is made of pigeon feathers and concrete, so I have to rely on video games to take me somewhere awesome, like a castle.
Video games have always loved castles, first sculpting them out of gray blocks in the 80s Wolfsteinthen of slightly more textured beige panels, as in the aptly titled 1991 city builder Castles. Now video games have lock options; You can explore the imagination through pixelated nostalgia or push the limits of our PCs with imaginary wrought iron carved facades and sparkling sunsets dissolving everywhere. These are the castles I want to focus on in this slideshow, which I’ve populated with spectacular game concept art.
I’m not saying elaborate video game castles are inherently better than their blocky, ’80s-inspired compatriots. But there is no comparable experience of approaching these giants, walking through them or observing their massiveness by walking on something like this a Elder Ring Horse.
You understand video game castles from existing concepts of historical architecture, but real castles were designed to be impenetrablesome of them testimonies of God, some of them were inhabited only by a select group of people for a select part of history. They are already larger than life, somewhat incomprehensible.
Video game castles ironically increase the mystery by allowing you to step inside and look around, but only see something conceptual, over-the-top that could only exist in the virtual world. Elaborately designed and fully interactive, I think these types of video game castles represent the pinnacle of hyperreality, “the creation of models of a real-world sans […] Reality” as defined by the sociologist Jean Baudrillard in his seminal paper Simulacra and simulation
It is the best. These locks make me Think Emily Dickinson– “Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone – / Grand go the Years, / In the Crescent above them -” – regardless of whether a game mixes me to its version of Cinderella’s Castle with strawberries and cream, like Peach’s Castle through the different Mario gamesor a doomed heap of crooked stones, like most of the evacuated Gothic buildings in bloodborne. I’m excited to be there and play sham.
Keep clicking to do the same. I’m going to cheat a bit by showing you the stunning concept art for some of video games most impressive castles instead of showing screenshots of how they appear in-game. But think of it as another way to keep the magic going.