Videogames have a long history of modeling their polygonal worlds after an extensive menu of meatspace locales. And when it comes to urban landscapes, New York City is most certainly prime rib. As Jim Rossingnol points out on BLDGBLOG, more game artists have re-created or sampled from the Big Apple’s architecture than any other real-world cityscape, much in the same way that filmmakers find themselves constantly returning to the streets of NYC as a quintessential backdrop for stories of all kinds. Nintendo’s Pokémon franchise is the latest to follow this trend, but it would seem they’ve chosen to feature one of the city’s most ominous landmarks: Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center.For those not current on the art of Pokémastery, each game in the Pokémon series features a world loosely modeled after a real city or territory. In the game’s original iteration, for example, “Kanto” was, unsurprisingly, based on Japan’s Kanto region. For the game’s upcoming editions, Black & White, the game world will include representations of the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park and Grand Central Terminal. But in between the areas standing in for lower Manhattan and Midtown sits a devastated landscape called “Route 4.”Who better to explain than Brad “Keyboard Cat” O’Farrell:“… You can see fallen buildings and rubble in that area. It’s called Route 4 in the game. … You can see that it’s clearly a construction site. Archeologists and construction workers trainers can be battled, and there is construction equipment all over the place. This is, unmistakably, a representation of Ground Zero in a Pokemon game."If you dive deeper in to the Pokémon mythos, you’ll learn that Route 4 was destroyed not by a terrorist attack, but by a meteor from space. Part of the game’s plot apparently has to do with recurring villains Team Rocket attempting to steal a piece of the meteorite for their own nefarious purposes.The game is currently out only in Japan and therefore hasn’t been translated, so it may be too early to decide exactly what the designers meant to say by including the area. But even so, the imagery O’Farrell describes and the proximity of the area to other decidedly “New York” landmarks suggests that Pokémon creators may have intended it to be a slight nod to one of the darkest pages in New York City’s history.Check the video below and decide for yourself:via Tiny Cartridge
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