Codex
Welcome to the Codex, an open directory of video gaming landmarks every architect should visit. You can also read all posts tagged Codex.
An authentic depiction of Los Angeles in the year 1947 serves as background to the crime thriller LA Noire. The game presents an obsessively accurate recreation of the city’s built environment with faithful reproductions of buildings, locations, people and traffic patterns. LA Noire uses a distinctive color palette in homage to the aesthetics of the film noir and portrays the genre’s most iconic themes such as crime, corruption and moral ambiguity. It also includes an option to play in black-and-white. [#13]
The U.S.G. Ishimura is a planet cracker class mining vessel in the service of the CEC, a large mining conglomerate in the universe of Dead Space. It is both the largest and oldest of the massive planet cracker ships and has served as the flagship of the CEC mining fleet for over 60 years. Named after the inventor of the ship’s propulsion system, physicist Hideki Ishimura, it is used for large-scale, commercial, deep space expeditions. The Isimura’s primary function is to crack, mine, and smelt entire celestial bodies, including planets and moons, providing vast quantities of raw resources. During the events of Dead Space, the U.S.G. Ishimura unexpectedly enters radio silence after a successful expedition on the remote planet Aegis VII, prompting the CEC to dispatch an engineering team including Zach Hammond, Kendra Daniels, and the game’s protagonist Isaac Clarke, to investigate and repair the ship. [#12]
Orzammar is an underground dwarven city located in the western region of Ferelden, the mystical kingdom of Dragon Age: Origins. This fortress-city stands as the last bastion of the dwarven race and is a shining example of the crafting skills and outstanding ingenuity of its people. [#11]
Fallout: New Vegas takes place during the year 2281 and is set in a speculative post-apocalyptic vision Las Vegas, Nevada and the Mojave Desert. The gaming environment covers roughly the same size as the Capital Wasteland seen in Fallout 3 and is spread across parts of real-world Nevada, Arizona and California. Unlike other cities in the Fallout series, Las Vegas was not struck directly by a nuclear attack. Its buildings remain intact and mutation of its inhabitants is minimal. [#10]
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood recreates the architectural beauties of Renaissance Italy, presenting a faithful reproduction of Rome in the early 16th century. The game invites the player to revisit a fascinating era with its unique combination of social awareness and political unrest, art and violence, refinement and brutality. Truly an architect’s dream come true. [#9]
The Citadel is a massive space station featured in the Mass Effect series, constructed over 50 millennia ago in the heart of the Serpent Nebula. The nexus of the galactic community, it acts as its political, cultural and financial capital, housing the Citadel Council, a powerful, multi-species governing body. The Citadel is hailed as being the greatest creation of the Protheans, an extinct alien race which mysteriously vanished over 50,000 years ago. [#8]
Mafia II takes you on an exciting journey through Empire Bay, a fictional metropolis influenced by the urban atmosphere and architecture of New York, Chicago, Detroit and several other American cities. The charm of Empire Bay is mostly expressed through prominent architectural examples of Late Neoclassicism, Art Deco and Early Modernism, inspired by real world landmarks such as the Empire State Building, the Central Park, Brooklyn Bridge and L.A.’s Park Observatory, just to name a few. [#7]
Assassin’s Creed II takes place in an open world with nonlinear gameplay, allowing the player to roam freely within several regions throughout late 15th century Italy such as Venice, Florence, and the Tuscan countryside. With its focus on real-world locales like The Duomo in Florence or Piazza San Marco in Venice and historical figures like Lorenzo di Medici and Leonardo da Vinci, this game offers an evocative setting filled with visual details that infuse the world with life and elegance. [#6]
Rapture is a massive underwater city that lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Created by a fictional business magnate called Andrew Ryan, it is a utopian metropolis of Art Deco-styled buildings connected by a network of glass tunnels and a Bathysphere system. The city is completely self-sustaining, and all of its electricity, food, water and air purification are powered by the volcanic vents originated from the bottom of the sea. Rapture is intentionally isolated from the world, and the only way to access it seems to be bathyspheres taken down from the lighthouse perched on an island above. Bioshock presents a fantastically speculative world that is both a shining example of science-fiction and a brilliantly drawn architectural world. [#5]
Fallout 3 takes place in the year 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic version of Washington D.C., taking the player on a journey through an area known as the Capital Wasteland. [#4]
Liberty City is a fictional city portrayed as a generic version of the metropolitan area of New York. The city’s geography and alignment of districts features two major mainlands with a Manhattan-like central island (which contains a large park at the center, a reference to Central Park), and several smaller islands connected primarily by road bridges. Train services with lines running in the city are also present, providing Grand Theft Auto IV with one of the most convincing, living urban environments ever created for a video game. [#3]
Mirror’s Edge is set in a futuristic dystopian city dominated by a totalitarian regime. It’s gleaming, clean environment is hampered by the presence of invasive surveillance, tracking all forms of electronic communication in order to reduce crime to nearly nonexistent levels. [#2]
City 17 is a metropolitan area in Eastern Europe that forms the primary setting for Half-Life 2. The city features a variety of architecture types, from mostly Eastern European architecture dating from pre-World War II neoclassicism, to post-war revival of classical designs, Soviet Union modernism, and post-Soviet contemporary designs, as well as alien structures. The city is quite large, consisting of a railway station, a dilapidated canal system, underground road tunnels, and multiple communal living quarters and buildings. [#1]
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