The “nightclub level” — every game has one. From the rough and ready Grand Theft Auto series to the cartoonish Psyconaughts, to even the warfare of Call of Duty. It’s difficult to avoid the classic trope of pushing your character through a debaucherous smoky dancefloor to hunt down some ne’er-do-well. Nightclubs are a great mechanic in the gaming world – requiring minimal set dressing and character animation. Designers can get away with putting the player in a big, wide-open space full of nooks and crannies to explore, and a harsh overbearing bass can remove the need for spoken dialogue.
However, some nightclubs in games go the extra mile – with levels that will have you ready to boot your controller out of the window and get yourself down to your local dancefloor to catch the real deal. So immersive and fantastical that you’ll be thinking about them long after you’ve completed your mission objectives.
Not limited by real-world problems that impact our night spaces — such as developers, lack of financial support or, you know, physics — game nightclubs can be completely off the wall, coming in the form of a massive blimp in the sky, a bee-themed club frequented by cyborgs or a club that specialises in allowing you to relive others good memories.
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The thing is, with nightclubs in games, sometimes they are pretty bad. To the point where you’re wondering if the game developer has even been in a real nightclub, bad. Instead apparently basing their knowledge of what a dancefloor should look like on that scene in the Dark Knight where Batman punches up the patrons of Ministry of Sound. For some reason, everyone seems to be sitting down in a VIP area, unmoving, bathed in aggressive strobes.
Not this bunch. We’ve compiled a selection of fictional nightlife spaces that made us yearn for the dancefloor – whether that be in lockdown or before we had even been inside a club. Venues that we desperately wish were real, and some that remind us eerily of the real thing.
Source: https://mixmag.net/feature/best-video-game-nightclubs-gta-cod-call-of-duty-grand-theft-auto-hitman
