Gaming urbanist and level designer Konstantinos Dimopoulos is preparing a book Virtual Cities: An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities — the first atlas of its kind and a guide to cities from famous video games.

It will include layouts, illustrations and descriptions of more than 40 virtual settlements: from City 17 from Half Life 2 to Los Santos from the GTA V series and Silent Hill from the horror franchise of the same name.

Dimopoulos is working on the book together with the artist and designer Maria Kallikaki, who is responsible for the illustrations in the atlas.

“From fantastic megacities and villages from medieval fantasy to modern cities and urbanism in Gothic horror. The author and the artist study, describe and build maps of the most famous, complex and mysterious cities in the history of video games,” says the annotation to Virtual Cities.

According to Konstantinos Dimopoulos, each virtual city is accompanied by a detailed text covering its history, geography, key landmarks and an analysis of the layout in terms of level design. The book will be interesting and useful not only for lovers of cartography and fictional worlds, but also for game designers.

You can get an idea of the future edition from the chapter on City 17, posted in the public domain.

Virtual Cities raises money on the crowdfunding platform Unbound. The project has already been funded by 72%.

Also on the topic:

Tags: