i'd like to know what's the origin/cultural context of this recurring idea in especially 90s videogames (though we see it in the 00s and presumably in the 80s some too though im drawing a blank) of like
you've got some combination of
- vaguely medieval western europe level/hub/episode
- ancient egyptian pyramid level/hub/episode
- extremely vague mishmash of various mesoamerican cultures level/hub/episode
- greco-roman mishmash
- modern city
- future technological idk maybe spaceships or some shit
it should go without saying these are not represented in a particular culturally sensitive manner but they're there. the pyramid level is probably the most common of these but it feels like these are the main pieces.
it's incredibly common in FPSes of the era especially. the earliest FPS example i can think of in the genre is Eternal Doom (1996) which features a timetraveling plot that is basically the same exact plot as that of Chasm: The Rift (1997) and Daikatana (2000).
it's not limited to fpses, Diablo 2 (2000) did it, and outside of video games Stargate SG-1 (1997-2007) does it. and i know it's definitely older, like you have games like Commander Keen 4 (1991) doing it, which John Romero worked on.
i know while the released version of Quake (1996) doesn't have it, John Romero wanted American McGee to do an aztec-themed episode in it but McGee wasn't vibing with the textures and we ended up with McGee's metal levels instead (the theme the community has termed "runic"). and Romero was known to be in communication with at least some of the people that made Eternal Doom and would've certainly played a high profile community mod like that in 96, but the influence could've gone in either direction there. or not at all! i'm speculating!
the official Quake Mission Pack: Dissolution of Eternity (1997) would have a time-traveling storyline that resembles the same exact storyline of Eternal Doom/Chasm/Daikatana/etc.
According to Brian Raffel, Romero also interestingly was briefly involved with Hexen 2 (1997):
John helped in the early stages of the game. He will not have any input on the rest since he has left id.
And Hexen 2 has got this whole thing going on too. and then Romero went on to be in charge of Daikatana. so like, there feels like there's a Romero-specific connection here. Romero even hired Sverre "Cranium" Kvernmo from the Eternal Doom (1996) team.
I know at least part of this connects to, as Romero says in his autobiography, Doom Guy:
The Aztec theme was quite literally my past. Growing up in Tucson, Arizona, in a Yaqui family, Aztec symbolism was everywhere, from our museums to our fabrics to the sun stones depicting the Aztec calendar (one of which still hangs in my mother’s house).
there IS a Romero connection there with his game Pyramids of Egypt (1987). but that sort of just moves it farther back in time.
and obviously these things would go on to influence stuff like famous doom wad Alien Vendetta (2001). Even Unreal (1998) has something resembling this, though with a sort of space-alien twist on it all.
the thing is though, Chasm: The Rift definitely had no Romero working on it, neither did Diablo 2, etc. It's a larger cultural phenomenon than Romero and also I don't like doing anything that resembles Great Man Theory anyway.
Even games like Goldeneye 64 (1997), Command & Conquer: Renegade (2001), Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003), Serious Sam (2001), Unreal Tournament 2003/2004, would go on to touch on this kind of thing to a lesser degree. even the 2001 beta version of "Oblivion Lost", the game that would end up become STALKER: Shadows of Chernobyl (2006) included assets for egyptian and medieval themed levels and so on.
so like. WHATS UP WITH THAT. why was everyone doing it? and i guess it stopped partially bc of the fucking bizarre cultural shit that happened around 9/11??? idk
and like idk another question i have here is why this specific set of things, and why not, like, a babylonian level or like idk, a russian level, or something
Rare talks about this in a general sense in the behind-the-scenes material of Rare Replay, I believe. And their explanation was that: this was a time before the internet. If you wanted to research Cool Locations To Put in a Video Game, you had to go to a library and sort through actual, physical books, and that a lot of game developers were pulling from the same pool of resources since that's literally all anyone had access to.
There weren't massive stock photo repositories and Instagram accounts full of ten million pictures of every weird, interesting corner of planet earth. You had The One Reference Book About Egypt and so did everybody else. And thus, games tended to coalesce around a lot of similar looking locales.
also don't forget the outsized impact popular films had on the aesthetics of games, especially early on. indiana jones was a big hit a decade earlier, after all
There's a whole lot of different components of this going on in the posts and comments already so have some more!
Having varied worlds with unique tilesets was very much a praise-able quality for a game in the 8/16-bit era. Super Mario Bros. has 8 "Worlds" but on the NES release they're basically interchangeable save for the one that uses white trees to suggest snow.
Mario 3 meanwhile makes sure that its worlds are significantly more varied. You can much better tell if a given level is in the icy world 6, the desert world 2 (with a pyramid level!), the sky world 5, etc. Plus it sold millions of copies and so anybody looking to make their own successful platformer would want to stick to the formula as best as they could.
The common themes of temples/pyramids get the luxury of bein easier to design obstacles for. What's going to kill you in the grassland? Probably just the enemies placet's going to td there. What's going to kill you in the ancient template? Well, suddenly you've got pressure plates to activate traps, walls that crush players, arrows that shoot at set intervals. Games take advantage of the "no grave robbers please" angle and get to create some nasty architecture that's a lot harder to work into say, a beat em' up that takes place in a generic metropolitan area.
Then there's also the games themselves looking nicer if they can better hide that everything was still operating on a grid of 16x16 tiles. Draw one brick tile and suddenly you can no longer just immediately tell where one ground tile ends and the next begins.
I think this kind of design faded in the 2000s as games were taking place in more defined spaces, and once 3D became the norm, the push was so frequently for realism. You might get a Penny Arcade comic made about you game questioning how the player was seconds ago in a swamp and now they're in a blizzard. Half-Life emphasises Black Mesa as a real place with its opening tram ride as well as its loading zones lining up so that your start in the same room made in a different map as you move from place to place. Gordon Freeman can't find himself in lava land after launching the rocket. He's got to open up another door in the facility and head to to the next department. Games traded quantity of locations for quality of one.
Though plenty of games still tried their best to be that cohesive early on. The first Castlevania is a great example where each stage fairly cleanly transitions to the next. Sonic 3's troubled development and being split into two games made Sega have to work a lot harder to establish a connection from zone to zone (like the cannon that launches you into Ice Cap). Heck, Sonic 1's backgrounds convey the passage of time with the game going from morning in Green Hill, sunset in Spring Yard, to night time in Star Light.
Mairo 64's paintings allowed the established variety to be explained away and let Peach's castle look realistic on the outside, without having to worry about where the dining room would be on the inside.
IDK I'm rambling and just gonna post instead of trying to organize this more.
