📍Melbourne, Australia

Gothic: A Retrospective

28 September 2025

To this day, Gothic, the single-person Action Role-Playing Game released in 2001 remains my favourite of all time. Every so often I boot it up on my laptop and play my way through each of the game's epic chapters. I usually play it in German, keeping as close as possible to the original (which was developed in Germany by Piranha Bytes, a now defunct studio).

Immersion defined

In Gothic, as well as its successor, Gothic II (technically superior but without the true charm of the original), the towns are unmistakably Central European inspired. This theme is detectable in the stone paths, and the dark, gothic hues of the townships and camps that made up the world of Gothic. Gothic was janky, it was buggy, it lacked - in almost every sense - the refinement of modern games. But where modern games are soulless politically correct clones of the same old recipe, without any real hook, Gothic was immersion defined.

Characters had lives, in the evening they would be found around the campfire, at night in their small huts, in the morning completing their assigned tasks. Even the nameless hero, who the player follows through this dark and epic adventure, cannot hold a sword at first - wielding it like a noob intially, before working on his technique and visually improving with each level of training. There were no bouncing arrows to help your TikTok brain know the next step, nor were there pointless constraints in the inventory - our nameless hero could carry all the loot he wanted, and why not? How such a low-budget, graphically dated game could feel so immersive was a feat in and of itself.

The current thing

Now, admittedly, I rarely game anymore. Just as I only watch old films, and, borrowing from the great mind of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I never read a book that isn't at least 10 years old (there is already a lifetime of old film, literature and gaming, that you will never run out, and which is in every way superior to the current thing).

Gothic wasn't really an RPG. Sure, you played as a character, and there was the illusion of choice, but in reality, your choices would all lead to the same end. The trick was in not letting the player know that their choices had no meaning (much like modern democracy).

Gothic was a hard game, and in the initial chapters, the player is concerned with survival and will see a swift death at every wayward step off the well-trodden paths between each camp. Games today have all kinds of possibilities and endings, but still the focus of developers has become to expand the map, the possibilities, but at the expense of true imagination.

See, Gothic didn't even pretend to be a large game, it cleverly changed areas of the small map on each chapter in order to reuse assets. The effect was that the player was intimately familiar with every bug, every corner and every enemy, every friend in the map. It was this familiarity that made the game fathomable. It's the same reason I prefer towns over cities.

Next, and to this point I have already alluded, the developers were German. Opening up the codebase showed notes in the original German language, and every so often the game would bug out and expect the German keyboard input (where y and z for example are swapped). It was this distinct local aspect of the game, in which you could tell that the developers had borrowed so much from their own environment, from the architecture, the atmosphere and the culture- the world view! - of their own lives. This game was a snapshot into a better time.

Originality trumps VC finance

Years later, I was working in southern Germany and met one of the investors of the third instalment, Gothic 3, which deviated entirely from the original game, including the use of a different game engine which came off as cartoonish and even childish. It exhibited a huge map and yet its missions were repetitive and dull, its character development mundane, it had no soul. The aforementioned investor was astonished when I, and others in the team outlined so clearly why the third and final version of the game had been such a failure. To us it was obvious, to him, a boomer with money, it was meant to be a well-paying investment. Money, though, can't buy everything - or any of the best things - and VCs only work to kill that which makes an idea good in the first place.

This is entirely the point. The great things in this world, I have come to understand, are entirely organic. They are not top-down creations. Social housing is ugly, practical, nobody loves it; a single street in a European village with its tapestry of stones and walls and homes cannot be recreated, nor more adored. It is because of the Gothic phenomenon that I was, along with my brother, able to ship an entire SaaS product, while larger and more well-funded teams with fancy titles and project management tools fall and fail (despite the odds supposedly being in their favour). It is the often strange and naive world view that finds its way into games, novels, film and products which makes them so impressionable and valuable.

Gothic, and gaming, was ruined in the end, just like film has been and architecture, because it was eventually institutionalised. It was a passion project, and despite its flaws the player could feel the intention - the imagination - of the developers. I will never forget downloading it file by file from the internet on my dial-up connection around 2004 (without the in-game videos, of course!). Who would have thought pixels on a screen could leave such an impression on a young man?

The Gothic Remake is due to be released in 2026, I wonder if it will be any good, and hope it will be - to be optimistic is no crime! Nevertheless, to the developers of Gothic, vielen vielen Dank! I owe you all a beer!