Earlier today I remembered that just a double-click of my mouse away, I could "visit" Notre Dame Cathedral to see how it looked before this week's fire destroyed its roof, central spire and much of its interior. I had, after all, been inside there before. In the video game "Assasin's Creed Unity."
In fact, one of the reasons I chose to buy this game about a year ago or so was because I wanted to virtually visit famous landmarks of the Paris area like Versailles and Notre Dame. Not the Eiffel Tower though, of course, since, if you didn't know, the setting in the game is in the time of the French Revolution. Actually, to get technical about it, the real setting of the game, and the rest of the Assassin's Creed series is sometime in the near future and we are playing a character (Desmond?) who is subjected to some machine that allows him to kinda "time travel" by being placed in an elaborate virtual simulation made possible by his ancestor's memories, but his actions have ways of changing the past? It's quite a fucked up plot and the science is totally dumb. And frankly, the whole plot and sub-plots and secret societies and who's the good guys, who's the bad...it's confusing, boring and even though I've seen explanations on YouTube, it leaves me feeling a big...meh. I mean, who cares. This game, for me, holds interest only so far as it allows me to go exploring in a historical 3-D landscape featuring good graphics and mechanics. Beyond that, I really don't give a fuck about the factions and their rivalries in the past, present or future. But back to the reason for this post.
After I went into the game, I found out just by coincidence the game had last been saved, many months ago since I don't play it often, right about three blocks away from Notre Dame. A quick walk through the crowds of either bawdy and grubby-looking peasants or fancy-pants dandies in top hats and I was there. There were some effigies being burned by the angry mob near the front entrance, no doubt led by none other than Madame LaFarge. I got in character and pretended that my in-game character was cautioning the mob to be careful with that fire...the cathedral has to last more than a couple hundred years when it will really go up in flames. I motioned past the rabble of the unwashed, past the musket-wielding guards and into the great church. I walked around a bit and marveled at its immensity. You see, the in-game structure is depicted, stone for stone, beam for beam, incense burner for incense burner the same as the real one. Oh there might be a more modern doo-hicky here and there which wouldn't have been included in the game version since it would be anachronistic, and I'm pretty sure the game version didn't have electric lighting, but otherwise, I was for all intents and purposes inside Notre Dame.
And this brings me to the real reason I wrote this post (gawd, finally!).
Hours after leaving my little virtual tour (mainly because I got too close to the altar and the in-game hostile function was alerted so the guards killed me) I was reading the news and I saw this article. I wasn't the only one thinking about the realism of the iconic landmark in AC, even some feeling that the game's super-accurate representation might be helpful in reconstruction efforts on the real edifice.
Who said video games were a waste? For every historic structure recreated in vivid detail in games like the Assassin's Creed series and others, there are millions of copies of it out there to insure it will last forever.