Category Archives: Video Games
Video Games: Sci-fi or Ancient Astronaut Theory?
I personally do not play video games for several reasons. At the risk of offending some of my readers, I have long thought of video games as a costly and pointless waste of time (kinda like a blog, huh?). Video games are certainly entertainment for a lot of people, but not me. I have been aware of elements of ancient astronaut theory in the background stories of video games for some time now, but have been reluctant to comment on them because what I perceived to be my lack of knowledge of video games anything since the original Super Mario Bros. on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. After a little research on the internet, I am able to present the following…
“As Seen on TV” Concepts:
From what I’ve read, it seems that most sci-fi related games with ancient alien races present them as lost spacefaring civilizations which are rediscovered after thousands of years and luckily enough along with their highly advanced technology. This seems fairly harmless and basic ancient alien sci-fi. Popular games like Mass Effect and Halo both seem to have these types of lost ancient alien races in their stories. In Mass Effect, “the greatest discovery in human history” involves the finding of advanced ancient alien technology on the planet Mars. In the Halo games, there are mentions of an extinct race known as the “Forerunners” as well as the “Precursors” which predate the Forerunners that were worshiped as gods by the a group known as the Covenant. You can certainly read more about these fictional video game aliens by visiting the links in the post. What I found fascinating is how similar these types of stories are to the lost ancient alien races in recent sci-fi television programs such as Babylon 5 and various incarnations of Star Trek. I would like to focus on television’s lost alien races in the next post. When there is something seems mysterious and/or difficult to explain – oh, ancient aliens did it! Sadly, as we all know this convenient sci-fi cop-out exists in the real world.
Mesoamerican Astronaut Concepts:
I’ll look at one more game in this post, Rise of Legends. I find this to be much more offensive that either Halo or Mass Effect because of the involvement of a fictional representational Mesoamerican civilization with a bunch of ancient astronaut theory junk. The Cuotl in Rise of Legends have been “visited by the chariot of the gods a thousand years ago.” This is really unfortunate because Erich von Däniken isn’t even given credit for his own work of science fiction. The other two games in this post may have similar themes found in Star Trek and Babylon 5, but they are not doing so at the expense of an ancient civilization’s culture or history like another TV show, Stargate. It is disappointing how much credence Rise of Legends gives to the erroneous notions of ancient astronaut theory and pseudoarchaeology.
References and Links (All on-line information retrieved May 22, 2010)
http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Storyline
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Forerunners
