The astronomical ceiling of Seti I, 1999-styleĪnother game I started in 1999 but never found the time and persistence to finish is Pharaoh, a city-building game by Sierra Entertainment. This game and its successor ( Egypt II: The Heliopolis Prophecy, 2000), made me a sucker for 3D reconstructions and adventure games. The player also gains access to the village of Deir el-Medina (with lots of pretty red doors), an embalmer’s workshop, a nobleman’s tomb, a nobleman’s house and the temple of Karnak by night (with lots of bloody columns that all look the same). The reconstruction of the tomb of Seti I itself (pretty at the time, extremely pixelated obviously now) was so keen that when I finally visited the tomb last February, and the power went off for a moment immersing us all in darkness, I could find my way easily because I knew the 3D environment inside out. The game was based on historical places and events and involved real (French) Egyptologists in the making of it. The first thing you did was happily descend into the tomb carrying a torch and dropping dead in a shaft after a couple of meters, because you had forgotten to bring a plank. In it, the protagonist was given three days to prove the innocence of his father who was being accused of involvement in robbing the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings. It was a lovely thing called ‘edutainment’, set in 20 th dynasty Thebes. The first of these ( Egypt 1156 B.C.: Tomb of the Pharaoh, 1999) I kindly borrowed from my math teacher in secondary school. In the good old nineties and early noughties, there was a series of 3D adventure games centered around ancient Egypt that I have discussed in an earlier blog post. Also, it’s a fun way to release the inner nerd. I am mostly interested in the representation of archaeology and ancient cultures in video games, and the use of these games to present essentially academic content in an interactive (‘playful’) way to the public. They have also published a book of conference proceedings ( The Interactive Past) that can be downloaded for free. For instance, several conferences and workshops are being organized in Leiden by the Value Project, ‘an academic research group exploring the intersections of archaeology and video games’. Good news: researching video games in the context of archaeology is a thing now! It’s called ‘ archaeogaming’ and covers everything from the digging up of actual video games (think of the Atari video game burial) to the digitally ‘excavating’ of code inside an old computer game, the use of archaeological methods to approach video games, and the use of video games for archaeological purposes.
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