A love letter to videogame pubs

The pub is a haven and a hopeless place. Fantasy RPGs uphold the tavern as the hubworld of society. More than piazzas or busy markets or sturdy fortresses, the pub is where real things happen and where real people spit. It feels natural that it becomes a favourite of game designers. In our boring fleshy world they are both the alcoholic's watering hole and a place of legitimate relaxation and escape. They are a third space where office-cursed ghouls can unwind and complain about corporate, and a buzzing recruitment bazaar where jobs are slyly offered to those who dare to schmooze after a conference. Some of the best ideas happen in the pub, why shouldn't some of the best quests begin there too?

When I think of the game pub, I think first of Skyrim's roadside inns. It is impossible to estimate how much of Skyrim's sense of place is owed to its many thatched rest stops, offering you fireside and food in deep warm contrast to the blizzards outside. There's history in these pubs, even if it is the fictional history of a fantastical realm. 

They remind me of Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem, a piss-up shoppe supposedly in existence since 1189, buried into the side of a mountain where Nottingham castle once lowered ropes down a long shaft to haul up barrels from the cellar. Crusaders are said to have filled their cups here before disappearing off to deeply annoy the people of the Middle East in novel ways. I drank in that bar once, early in my career, following a flurry of interviews with Fez developer Phil Fish, Braid man Jon Blow, and Journey producer Robin Hunicke. I was drinking there not just to slurp up the history, but to celebrate the idea that maybe I had finally broken the pondscum atop the water of games journalism. The Third crusade was an abject failure, I would later learn, and the trifecta I had just circuited were all, in one way or another, equally cursed.

But at the time, I was resting on my win. This is what a good Skyrim inn feels like post-quest, when you sell a bunch of trash, gobble food, and down an ale - not because it does anything useful for your stats or your character - but just because it feels right to have a well-earned mug of froth. You've completed something. You've ticked a box for some god awful editor - I mean wizard. In Riften and Markarth, maybe you can feel a similar weight of Tamriel's history as I thought I did in Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem, maybe you can sense the bad times in the stone. But it's the ramshackle roadside haunts that feel more like a real place.

If we're talking Full English pubs, there is always The Stars At Night, the white-walled country pub of Everybody Goes To The Rapture, which deserves kudos for accurately capturing the small village boozers of rural England, right down to the darts boards, garden benches, and dark mahogany seats. It felt real enough a place for PC Gamer to review the pub completely independently of the game it existed within. If you have ever been out on a Sunday drive during the summer in Yorkshire, you have seen this bar. 

But there is another (far less idealised) type of Britpub. Dishonored's pub, the Hound Pits, best captures the dour flavour and sad clientele of a Battersea night out. You can whip out your heart in any sorrowful bar in England, but I wouldn't advise it. Much better to do so in Dishonored, where your heart will outright tell you the losses and loves of all those grimacing drinkers as you walk around more nosey than thirsty. "They top off the wine with river water," she tells you. "But eventually someone swoons, then fresh bottles are fetched from the cellars." Again, the river city pubs of England and Scotland are faithfully represented. "Deals are made here, sometimes under the influence of wine," the heart says. "And sometimes the influence is the point of a knife."

I've been in plenty of equivalents to the Hound Pits, sore neighbourhood bars that don't know when to die. And it's this exploitation of that commonplace memory that makes the pub a hit. In presenting me with a pub, the familiar home of mad little events, games don't just evoke the comfort of hot food on a cold day, or the hustle and bustle of cosmopolitan questlife. They are tugging at all the frayed and soaked strings in my brain, all the pubs I have known in my life, and the mundane skulduggery that occurred there. Playing Gwent in a pub in Novograd shoots me back to playing real card game Netrunner in the Old Thameside Inn. Walking through the bumping crowd in a factory nightclub in Hitman gives me wide-eyed reminiscares of a Justice gig in an old Sheffield steel mill. I love the videogame bar, because I no longer go to these places but love to remember them. It is likely I simply miss the friends who were with me.

Like Skyrim's inns, there is a cobwebbed chamber of my heart devoted to the taverns and tavernas of Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord, each of which exists as a template for all the other bars across that warring medieval world. To walk into a bar in the realm of Battania is to walk into a bar in Aserai is to walk into a bar in the Khuzait Khanate is to... well, you get it. The cosmetic differences of architecture or people's dress quickly gives way to the universal language of stooge recruitment. Want to hire a mercenary? There is one in every pub in the world, and they will say the same few lines to you, no matter where you are. In every pub across Calradia, you can order a round for everyone in the room.

I have loved this universality of bar drinkin' in real life too. Just as I lived out speedy in-game weeks in some hot drinking den in the medieval game town of Sanala, so too I passed real months in Fito's Bar of San José, Costa Rica, an establishment open to the sky, where you could sweat the night away in sluggish freedom, never knowing if the heat came from the chilliguaro or from the unbreakable equator. 

In Fito's, I was a lost soul among ex-pats and language learners, a digital nomad before the world knew to consider such people with the healthy disdain we deserve. It's probably the complete borked sense of past lived experience talking, but my memory of Fito's gives me the same sensation I enjoy in a good videogame bar, especially those of Mount & Blade - the sneaking feeling like you do not belong, that you're just passing through, and that you may as well get shatterblasted and accept a job skinning wild animals for pocket money from a total stranger.

There are many other good videogame pubs. Cyberpunk 2077's Afterlife is a cool neon scuzzden. Yakuza's karaoke bars are small, understated beauts. The Stardrop Saloon in Stardew Valley is arguably the heart of the town, if you don't count the player themselves. But the ones I like best are still the grubby taverns with straw on the ground and a fire burning in the middle of the room. The best pub is the one you know you're going to leave behind.