Neuschwanstein
Neuschwanstein is a beautiful castle in southwest Bavaria. King Ludwig II had it built as a retreat and homage to Richard Wagner. The foundation stone was laid in 1869. It was nearly finished in 1886 when Ludwig was declared insane and died soon afterwards under mysterious circumstances.
Neuschwanstein is an ever-popular tourist destination and the most photographed building in Germany. And it is probably the building most often represented in video games, especially Japanese video games.
In 1984, Bomb Jack
was the first arcade machine ever to feature background images. And it
was the first game ever to show a picture of Neuschwanstein.
When the game was remade in 1993 as Bomb Jack Twin, all the locations were new. Except one.
The next year,
City Connection
had a 15 year old girl named Clarice drive around the world in a
Honda City Hatchback looking for the love of her life, avoiding
police cars and flag-waving cats. The locations she’s checking
out include the Champs Élysées, Abu Simbel and a German castle
the name of which has escaped me at the moment.
Mike the Magic Dragon
is a 1987 Amiga platform game for the Amiga aimed at younger
audiences. It’s pretty much like Randy Glover’s
Jumpman,
but it has background images of various castles, including
you-know-what.
Strangely, this seems to be the only German game ever to feature Neuschwanstein. Most of the others are Japanese.
In the 1990 NES game Wall Street Kid, you have to make a million
dollar out of $500,000 on the stock market in a short time, and
buy back an heirloom castle in Europe. And this heirloom castle
looks a lot like…
Pretty Girl Campaign is some sort of turn-based strategy game.
It was released in 1994 by the Taiwanese company Art.9 Entertainment.
The castle from the intro sure looks familiar, and we find it again
later on the game map.
The Japanese are very fond of Wizardry, especially the first three games, which have been ported to every new platform that comes out. In 1997, they were re-released as Wizardry LLylgamyn Saga, for Playstation, Sega Saturn and Windows. Of course, the Windows version had to have an icon.
This must have been a mistake. No, this just isn’t done. One of the Commodore 64 versions of Into The Eagle’s Nest had Neuschwanstein on the cover as the Nazi castle (The Eagle’s Nest) you have to infiltrate. It looks completely different in the game!