Game worlds can feel mighty big, but even the most sprawling open worlds are surprisingly small when compared to the real world. This makes sense, of course—no one wants to spend multiple actual days traveling on horseback from Valen to Novigrad, or hours stuck in traffic trying to get from one side of San Andreas to the other. The whole art of open-world games is making them feel big while also keeping their scale manageable.
This tension between realism and practicality really comes into full relief in games based on real-world locations. The Fallout games are a prime example—as evidenced by the work of YouTube artist Ganshirt Art, which recreates some of Fallout’s iconic in-game locations in a real-world context. He started with the great green jewel of Fallout 4’s Commonwealth, Diamond City, which—for anyone who’s not played the game—is the game’s biggest “city”, located within Boston’s Fenway Park. His latest piece is more ambitious: it tackles the entire Strip from Fallout: New Vegas.
Ganshirt’s videos explain his composition process, which starts with finding the IRL location in Google Maps, choosing a suitable angle and scale for the painting, and then superimposing a screenshot of the real-world location over the in-game map. This allows him to work out how the game location fits within its real-world surroundings and serves as the basis for the final piece. As the artist explains in the New Vegas video, “The goal is to use the underlying screenshot as a template for scale and some rudimentary texture, not as a significant component of the final painting.”
Even this basic step, however, can lead to difficulties. For instance, canon demands that Freeside—the shanty town that functions as a home for those unable to talk or buy their way into New Vegas proper—is built right up against the walls of the New Vegas Strip. In reality, however, there’s a three-mile gap between the part of the Strip depicted in-game and the residential areas of Las Vegas that best match the architecture of Freeside’s ruined buildings.
It’s in the reconciliation of these sorts of dilemmas that simple reproduction ends and art begins. The fact that there’ll never be a perfect fit between game world and real world means that the artist has to fill the gaps himself, and it’s the way he goes about doing so that’s the most interesting part of these videos. The fact that these pieces depict such large parts of the game world also means there’s necessarily an element of impressionism to them: they evoke the atmosphere of their respective games, rather than providing a perfectly faithful recreation.
The process looks painstaking in the extreme, but the results are worth it. Both paintings provide fascinating insights into the sorts of compromises and design decisions involved in recreating IRL locations for game worlds—and they’re also rather lovely works of art, especially the New Vegas piece. If you fancy one of them for a blank spot on your wall, both are for sale.
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