Post Apocalyptic Cosplay

Cosplay by Meg Turney. A Psycho-Bandit in the shooter game Borderlands.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us is an post-apocalyptic third-person survival action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog for the PlayStation 3. It was officially revealed on December 10, 2011 during the Spike TV Video Game Awards.

Exotic Gamer Ruins

Two illustrations by the digital artist Le the boss of Adhesive games, the studio behind the promising Hawken, a multiplayer mech shooter on PC.

Earthrise

Cover and two nice screenshots of the post apocalyptic video-game Earthrise, released in 2011.

A New Beginning

A New Beginning is a adventure game for Microsoft Windows. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic scenario, where earth has been destroyed by forces of nature. I think it's more for children, so there aren't zombies and stuff like this and it's more about reconstruction and building.

Avalon

Avalon (2001) is a Japanese-Polish science fiction film. The film is set in a dystopian future, where the population is hooked on an immersive illegal virtual reality video game called Avalon. One player of the game, Ash wants to reach a secret level hidden within Avalon. The film follows her quest to find the level.
There are a lot of scenes with derelict cities in decay, filmed in nice sepia tones.

Tomb Raider Ruins

Some nice ruins from Tomb Raider: Underworld. A good example what gorgeous decorations ruins are still providing.

Deathend Browser Game

These days theirs is a new browser game called Deathend on the web. In post apocalyptic ruins you have to kill hordes of mutants.
Sounds kind of boring, but anyway to me it underlines once again that post apocalyptic ruins made some of the most popular sceneries for games.

Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is first-person shooter game elements. Based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In a post apocalyptic world you have to fight mutants in the dark tunnels of the metro system.

Graphics and animation are really great. Maybe it’s a little surprising that a Russian computer game is still so strongly influenced by Stalingrad.

Evangelical Etertainment

"Left Behind: Eternal Forces" is a Christian video game based on the evangelical Christian Left Behind series of novels. The player controls the Tribulation Force, a Christian military group in a post-apocalyptic New York ("post-Rapture" is the Christian term). He has to fight against the world government led by the Antichrist.

To defeat the enemy the player has to convert neutral and enemy-allied civilians or to annihilate them. He is encouraged to use conversion over violence when possible.

Nevertheless the game caused a lot of criticism upon its release. Even many Christian groups criticized the use of religious intolerance and violence as essential parts of the game. One critic said: "The game is about killing people for their lack of faith in Jesus."
But just because of that it may be a good example for the Christian Supremacist movement in the United States of today.

Pixel Apocalypse

Probably one of best apocalyptic clips on Youtube is PIXELS by Patrick Jean. It’s very clever planned and well-realized. Old classic video games are destructing New York converting it into pixels.

Post-Apocalyptic 3D City

3DRT produces 3D models which can be used by developers of multimedia applications and games. On their homepage 3DRT.com offers a lot of stuff: characters, vehicles, arms, spaceships and whole cities. I was especially interested in the cities and really surprised that half of these consist in ruins. It seems that day and night-versions of an abandoned city are the most important things, that game developers need today.

Nice photos but here the animation on YouTube

Fallout 3

Some impressive pictures of the video game Fallout 3:



For me the pictures of Fallout 3 are like a summary of modern post-apocalyptic ruin aesthetics.

Borderlands

Borderlands is a science fiction shooter game developed by Gearbox Software for Windows, Xbox and PlayStation and released end of 2007.

The Background is set on the planet of Pandora where rich mines of minerals have attracted colonists. After the "gold rush" the colonists live in isolated settlements and many became bandits.



I dont’t want to evaluate the game here, but the scenery formed by abandoned industrial complexes and rests of alien ruins looks therefore a lot like that of post-apocalytic games. But above all it underlines the importance of a good ruin decoration for shooter games.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the ruins of Chernobyl

Here some pictures of another shooter game. "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl". It’s made by the Ukrainian developer GSC Game World and published in 2007.

The background is borrowed from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker and the graphics are influenced by the abandoned city of Prypiat.

At least it’s another example for how popular ruins are among video gamers.

More information about the game (in Spanish) and nice screenhots can be found there.

Fallout 3: Post-Apocalyptic Shooter

Here a trailer from the video Game Fallout 3.



I’m no great fan of shooter games, but seeing the really impressive ruin scenery, the cutting irony of the trailer I will think it over.

Fascinating Ruins

We see ruins nearly every day in the news and they have nothing charming or romantic. They tell us about disasters, loss and misery. Not long ago we’ve seen the devastations caused by the tsunami in Asia, a little later there could be seen the results of Hurricane Katrina and that of the great earthquake in China. And these natural disasters are reinforced by the frequently wars with their bombs and rockets, which are destroying with increasing regularity dreams, families and lives of so many people.


Survivors in front of ruins mourning their dead and their losses. These are the typical ruin images, with which we are confronted almost every day.

But on the other hand the web is full of sites devoted to ruins. It seems that there are a lot of people (me included) who are roaming through ruins, taking nice photos, which are presented like some of the most beautiful and enchanting places of the world.

Even worse these guys are no bunch of necrophilic perverts because they are not alone, they are part of a mass phenomenon. Some of the most successful movies, which produced Hollywood in the last decades, are using decay and ruins as sensational scenery.

And there are not only the movies. If you have a look on fantasy paintings and modern comics you will soon discover, that’s above all a good ruin setting which provides the spice in this kind of art.


Hollywood and comics merged into video games, and so it isn’t surprising at all, that ruins provide an important part of the scenery of the better games.

Ruins became so popular that there are even sites in internet offering tawdry ruins by the dozen as screensavers.

Maybe that someone will interpret this as a sign of bad taste inherent in any use of ruin images. I don’t think so, because ruins as symbolic décor have in fact infiltrated the very esthetical world of fashion and received in this way the higher consecrations of art.

This image by the fashion photographer David LaChapelle was first published in 2005 in the Vogue Italy and is now exhibited by the Helmut Newton Foundation in the exhibition "Men, War & Peace".

I hope to have demonstrated, that the fascination for ruins spreads over a great part of modern esthetics. With this blog I will try to show how ruins are used today in popular culture – i.e. photography, film, painting, comics, video games, fashion, architecture. Further I will investigate how the interpretation of ruins has changed over the course of history. This will be more a trip into art history because in older times there where neither movies nor video games. But I think that many of our modern concepts and opinions regarding ruins have their roots there.

And despite I’m no great photographer I fear that I cannot abstain from posting some of my own photos. Sure, nearly every day I stumble upon better ones in the web. But everybody finds his own ruins, has his own point of view, and because of that probably somebody will get an inspiration by my photos to visit some places.