1 The Rapture – Bioshock
Rapture is a beautiful underwater city, all art deco flourishes and bold dreams of utopia. But like many of the real world micro-nations formed to offer alternative models for society or aggrandise those with an abundance of ambition, in the fiction of BioShock the city failed to meet its vision. The result is a place that is haunting to explore, and at its most captivating when at its quietest. Its fictional architect’s libertarian aspiration may have spawned a leaking nightmare on the seabed, but as a backdrop to bad dreams Rapture is one of the most memorable locations of any video game. The entire place oozes a sense of history, and it is soaked in enough detail to make it feel entirely believable.
2 Vice City – Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
As Grand Theft Auto’s infamous city locations have grown in size with most new releases, only the most dedicated players today find themselves familiar with every nook and cranny. But intimacy can be a large part of the pleasure in playing a GTA; knowing just where to disappear through a short cut, or returning to a favoured vantage point in the heat of a battle. As with reality, enjoying a city can come most meaningfully from knowing it like a friend. It was 2002’s Vice City that hit an apex in terms of the scope of its spread. It was big enough to escape in, but not such a sprawl that it too often felt unfamiliar. And its homage to 1986 Miami served as what is perhaps still developer Rockstar’s greatest pastiche of contemporary popular culture yet.
3 The City – SimCity
There were city-building games before the 1989 debut of SimCity, and there have been many since. Today the free-to-play model is at the centre of the genre – or at least a large part of it. But in 1989 building a city in SimCity wasn’t about spending real money; it was about making fictional cash, and spreading a concrete rash across vast rural expanses. SimCity asked players to juggle taxes, industry, housing, transport and much else besides, and it made it all remarkably fun. The visual detail of a city in Will Wright’s influential masterpiece might have presented little more that of a representative 2D map, but it was what was behind those blocky graphics that gave heart and soul to the game. Theses cities were the player’s pet, making the appearance of the game’s earthquakes, fires and even monsters utterly crushing.
4 San Vanelona – Skate
When EA studio Black Box built the streets and parks of fictional city San Vanelona, they constructed a place both large and diverse. But the virtual metropolis’s true strength becomes apparent when looking a little closer. For Skate was truly a skateboarder’s skateboarding game, where spending hours seeing what was possible between a single rail and a nearby bench was more beguiling than stunt jumps over entire districts. The game development architects behind San Vanelona – itself a little like Barcelona with a seasoning of American urban style – had clearly put much effort into the minutiae of street furniture and the undulations of the ground, to tremendous benefit to the gameplay.
5 Goron City – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Perhaps a city in name a little more than in size, Ocarina of Time’s subterranean conurbation lacks the skyscraping structures and multiple suburbs of others on this list. But as a charming, distinct fantasy settlement that feels every part the heart of a community, it is possibly the most memorable location in Zelda’s finest instalment. Built from gaping caves and ancient walkways, it is also a place of many secret doorways and entrances that lead to some of the game’s hidden reaches, and so to know every inch of Goron City is to truly know Ocarina of Time. It’s also worth noting that Goron City is a place of wonderful, catchy music, and years after leaving, its melodies can still dance around players’ minds.
6 Metro City – Final Fight
When beat ‘em up players weren’t playing Street Fighter, a lot of their visits to the arcade meant a trip to Final Fight’s Metro City. It was effectively but a backdrop to the scrolling brawler, yet its vandalised trains, derelict alleys at the feet of glistening tower blocks and abandoned vehicles presented a dystopian vision that reflected a core trend in Japanese game design of the era. And while players’ concentration on the frame-by-frame action in a foreground melee meant Metro City could have played little more than set dressing, it boasted a wealth of detail in its few screens of material. Across the Final Fight series Metro City played host to minigames, weapon caches and training gyms, but it was the character and artwork that really make it shine.
FUTURE TECH
The ET excavation
In 1982 a stretch of Mexican landfill contained deep in its belly one of the great gaming urban legends. The myth went like this: Atari had reason to bury numerous unsold games after the era’s devastating industry crash. Primarily, countless copies of its mediocre E.T. game were rumoured to be contained deep in the soil, and so went on about 20 years of speculation of lost prototypes and concrete-enclosed collectibles.
Now the site has been excavated and last month its games started selling on eBay for upwards of $500. But we won’t spoil the details here. That would undermine Atari: Game Over, a newly released documentary that looks at the mythology and the excavation.
The film is available to view for free on Xbox Live.
PIXEL PERFECT
While the first-person shooter was still finding its feet in the 90s, another down-the-gun-sights gaming form briefly held favour. Wild Guns is one of the prime examples of the gallery shooter. It’s a third-person shooter in two-dimensional form, mixing themes from cowboy frontiers and steampunk about five years before the movie Wild Wild West did a rather less graceful job. And now Wild Guns (Natsume, £5.49) has been rereleased for the Wii U.
Originally an SNES title that took far too long to make it to European shores, Wild Guns is beautifully crafted in the arcade mould. It demands much from the reactions, and is remarkably tough. While the gallery shooter is a genre that shows its age in the modern era, the gameplay here remains solid and its 16-bit visuals are delightful.
