The worst thing a kid can say about homework is that it is too hard. The worst thing a kid can say about a game is it’s too easy.—Henry Jenkins, media scholar (attributed)
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You know what’s harder than playing most video games? Finding even one that names, portrays or otherwise references New Haven.
Here are three:
Red Dead Redemption (2010)
During the mission “The Prodigal Son Returns (to Yale),” Red Dead’s protagonist, John Marston, a western outlaw-turned-outlaw hunter, finds Yale anthropology professor and frustrated field researcher Harold MacDougal ready to high-tail it back to New Haven. “Do you know, do you know the thing, the thing that is vital without which scholarship cannot proceed sir?” he asks Marston. “Not having a bullet in your flipping neck sir!”
He describes the Wild-Westerners he’s met as “savages” incompatible with his civilized nature. “I’m from Connecticut!” he says as if to prove the point, perhaps instead proving that the writers didn’t do enough research on Connecticut. Our state was the nation’s ace gun manufacturer both at the time of the game’s setting (1911, in the very last days of the Old West) and for decades prior (having, for example, produced some 40% of all the rifles purchased by the Union during the Civil War). New Haven, meanwhile, was home to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, the city’s top employer at the turn of the century. Winchester manufactured the Model 1873, “the gun that won the west,” which featured prominently in the game as the “Winchester Repeater.”
Anyway, when Marston drops MacDougal off at the train station, having freshly saved him from bandits, MacDougal predicts a silver lining to the misadventure he’ll report when he gets back home: “They’ll give me a prize in New Haven for this!”
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (1989)
Like the blockbuster movie it’s based on, this computer game’s story, set in 1938, begins in earnest by telling us that Indy’s dad, professor and archaeologist Henry Jones, Sr., has spent decades filling a diary with cryptic historical clues he hopes will help him find the Holy Grail.
And, if we can sidebar for a moment, that’s sort of what it feels like to try and find New Haven’s place in the Indiana Jones franchise. There’s evidence to suggest Indy’s fictional employer, Marshall College, is a stand-in for Yale, with its fictional home of Bedford, Connecticut, a stand-in for New Haven. Exhibit A is a set of locally filmed scenes in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) that literally makes it so. Exhibit B is a special-edition 2011 action figure set, whose box displays a “top secret” letter addressed to Indy care of Marshall. The zip code? Our very own 06511. Troubling for those of us who want it to be true that Indiana Jones lives in a parallel New Haven is the evidence against: explicit mentions of Yale and New Haven by other franchise media, in which case Marshall can’t be Yale nor Bedford New Haven.
Which brings us back to the computer game. Packaged with the initial floppy disk release was a condensed and reimagined physical copy of the Grail diary, whose first entry, in a neat curly script, begins, “New Haven, Connecticut / April 3, 1898…” And though it means New Haven isn’t Bedford, what follows is still a pretty good get for us: “Last night I experienced a vision,” Indy’s father writes, going on to describe the holy revelation that sets him on his quest to find the Grail—and therefore puts New Haven at the genesis of the entire third film.
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020/2024)
This game for self-professed flight geeks aims to simulate flying a plane about as well as sitting at a computer can, its virtual cockpits so authentic that some pro pilots use them to practice their “instrument flow” at home. But the game also intends to accurately simulate the places where planes depart and land, including, as an add-on module, our very own Tweed New Haven Airport. The module’s makers promise “accurate airport layout, custom ground textures, and realistic terminal details,” which pass my eye test. So do some features, fleetingly visible in the trailer video, of the surrounding Morris Cove neighborhood, including sandy coastal strips at Fort Hale Park, Morris Beach and Lighthouse Point. Also in the trailer, a very quick post-takeoff beat shows a squinting version of the view I was hoping for: of downtown New Haven, its skyline a grove of only vaguely decipherable polygons on the far side of the harbor.
Oh well. As with those polygons on that in-game horizon, you usually have to squint to find New Haven in video games, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to look.
Written by Dan Mims. Image 1 features a virtual southerly view of Tweed New Haven Airport in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Image 2 features Professor MacDougal in Red Dead Redemption. Image 3 features the first page of the Grail diary accompanying Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure.
