TY - JOUR
T1 - Reading Antiquity in Metro Redux
AU - Bishop, Chris
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2018.
PY - 2020/5/1
Y1 - 2020/5/1
N2 - 4A Games’s Metro Redux (2014) plays at the intersection of literature and video games. The suite consists of two games, the first of which (Metro 2033) was based on the self-published novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky: Mempo 2033 (2005) and Mempo 2034 (2009). The games, like the novels, are set in the metro system of Moscow some 20 years after a nuclear apocalypse. Remnant communities, forced underground, congregate in stations that function as nascent city-states. Some stations are independent and unaligned, while others have formed factions (the mercantile “Hanza,” the communist “Red Line,” and the fascist “Fourth Reich”). A powerful central coalition, “Polis,” through the agency of its “Spartan” field agents, seems alone in its attempts to bring order to the metro and recolonize the ruined city above. But Polis and the Spartans are not the only such elements in Metro Redux, and players are quickly immersed in a landscape of Soviet neoclassicism, itself a polyvalent and highly politicized 20th-century Reception. This article will begin to explore what such receptions of Reception might mean.
AB - 4A Games’s Metro Redux (2014) plays at the intersection of literature and video games. The suite consists of two games, the first of which (Metro 2033) was based on the self-published novels of Dmitry Glukhovsky: Mempo 2033 (2005) and Mempo 2034 (2009). The games, like the novels, are set in the metro system of Moscow some 20 years after a nuclear apocalypse. Remnant communities, forced underground, congregate in stations that function as nascent city-states. Some stations are independent and unaligned, while others have formed factions (the mercantile “Hanza,” the communist “Red Line,” and the fascist “Fourth Reich”). A powerful central coalition, “Polis,” through the agency of its “Spartan” field agents, seems alone in its attempts to bring order to the metro and recolonize the ruined city above. But Polis and the Spartans are not the only such elements in Metro Redux, and players are quickly immersed in a landscape of Soviet neoclassicism, itself a polyvalent and highly politicized 20th-century Reception. This article will begin to explore what such receptions of Reception might mean.
KW - Metro 2033
KW - Russian history
KW - Russian literature
KW - classical reception studies
KW - video games
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85050206347&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1555412018786649
DO - 10.1177/1555412018786649
M3 - Article
SN - 1555-4120
VL - 15
SP - 308
EP - 327
JO - Games and Culture
JF - Games and Culture
IS - 3
ER -