#Book of erebus vampire bible screen shots archive
The futuristic archive in ‘Destiny’, on the planet Venus (Source: Daniel Destiny/Bungee).
#Book of erebus vampire bible screen shots full
In both cases, they are evil places, full of enemies and danger. In Diablo 3, the archives are the domain of Zultan Kulle, an evil warlock who collected his archive as part of his unceasing quest for more power. In Path of Exile, the player has to fight their way through hordes of zombie skeletons called ‘Undying Archivists’ to reach their objective, the Golden Pages. They are arguably more similar to the archives of the popular imagination, full of dark corners and scrolls. And they also both have archives, although they are not ones that a modern day archival researcher would necessarily recognise. They are both played in the axonometric projection, which is a posh way of saying that the player looks down on the action. Path of Exile and Diablo 3 are medieval dark fantasy action RPGs, set in worlds full of magic, swords and necromancy. Not all games are set in our world, however. The rotunda of the National archives in ‘Fallout 3’, looking a little rough around the edges compared to how it looks today (Source: Fallout 3/Bethesda Game Studios). The player can embark on a quest to retrieve a copy of the Declaration of Independence from the archive’s basement, copies of which are held in the real National Archives. Now obviously the building is looking a little the worse for wear after 250 years and a nuclear apocalypse, but it is much the same in the game as it is in real life, right down to those awkward microfiche machines that have dogged many an archival researcher. in the year 2277, and many of the locations are based on real places, including the National Archives. The action takes place in and around Washington D.C. Fallout 3 is a first person shooter/RPG (Role-Playing Game, for the uninitiated), set in a post apocalyptic world where civilisation has been destroyed by nuclear war. One of my personal favourites, Fallout 3, is also the game which has one of the most realistic representations of an archive in gaming, in some respects anyway. I dabble in gaming myself, and of course my attention has been drawn to the variety of ways in which archives are represented in the myriad of virtual worlds brought to life through my computer screen. Computer games have become for focus of a lot of scholarly research, and there is even an entire journal dedicated to the topic, called Game Studies. However as the variety and scope of games continue to expand, and online gamers create ever more complicated virtual communities, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore or dismiss them. Video games can be a controversial topic they are frequently condemned for their violence and accused of corrupting vulnerable young people. The archive is the means through which the good guy finds out what the bad guy is up to, thus progressing the story.
Blade the sets out to try and stop Frost. Frost was trying to enact a prophecy he found in the Bible, which would give him enough power to take over the world and bring an end to humans. Frost has been using the archive to translate the the Book of Erebus, the vampire bible whose meaning had been long since forgotten. Jensen the plans of the film’s baddie, evil vampire Deacon Frost. Inside, they find futuristic data banks and a grossly overweight and flatulent archivist, who reveals to Blade and Dr. Karen Jenson fight their way through a club to find a vampire archive, the entrance to which is hidden in an industrial fridge. Blade and his plucky but naive companion Dr. Archives, libraries, and other repositories of knowledge are often used in films as a method of exposition, or of revealing some information that moves the plot along, and Blade is no different. I recently rewatched Blade, and apart from being shocked by the dodgy CGI, I was interested by the film’s representation of archives.
We will probably never know if the mistake was my parents’ or Blockbusters’, but my Mum still thinks Blade Runner is about a leather-clad vampire hunter.
Instead of Ridley Scott’s epic visual masterpiece they ended up with Blade (1998), an over-the-top vampire film starring Wesley Snipes. There is an anecdote in my family that my parents once tried to rent Blade Runner (1982).
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