It strikes me that there are now enough pictures of College Street to be able to recreate this area in a 3D first-person videogame, following my picture-sourcing and resulting cavalcade of discoveries of the last week (see my posts and Patreon-only posts here at Tentaclii). Only Lovecraft’s central ‘garden court’ itself is still elusive in ground-level photography. [Update: Ken Faig has good maps showing precise boundaries around No. 66 and the location of the cat-shed].
A 3D recreation of the area could be set-dressed almost exactly as it would have been when Lovecraft was living at 66 College Street, complete with seasonal and atmospheric effects.
The game environment could also stretch all the way down College Street, as that other end of the street is well-documented visually — this section would usefully offer offices for an investigative RPG game. The resulting completed environment could then be released under GPL (open source), so that anyone could devise and build a game from that base environment. Or just virtually stroll around in it.
If “monsters n’ machine-guns” are felt to be needed then the could also be an underground element, re: the tunnels under the hill…
“Did we know, he asked, his sombre eyes intent on our faces, that recently, when early buildings on Benefit Street and College Street were razed to make way for new ones, deep tunnel-like pits, seemingly bottomless and of undetermined usefulness, were discovered in the ancient cellars?” — memoir of a visit by Lovecraft in 1934, by Dorothy C. Walter.
The disused Providence East Side Railway Tunnel under the hill could also feature. At the far end the tunnels could give access to the Seekonk River shoreline and perhaps even a short boat trip through heavy fog to the Twin Islands in the river. Wrapping the game’s horizons in a heavy Halloween fog and night would mean less work, re: making backdrops showing views of distant horizons.
The environment space I’ve outline above offers a fairly limited, and thus manageable, set of places:
The Paxton/Arsdale Boarding House.
The Carrie Tower.
Van Wickle Gate.
The lawns and reception on the main Brown University frontage.
The John Hay Library.
Lovecraft’s house, lane and garden.
The Alpha Delta Phi fraternity house.
The Providence Athenaeum.
Offices on lower College Street.
Court House on lower College Street.
Tunnels under College Hill.
Apart from a working looped tram (trolley-car) line, no vehicles would be required. A basic set of NPCs would be students and faculty, artists from the School of Design, various librarians and curators, and the more elderly retired residents. There would probably be a need to make and animate the tall elm trees and cats from scratch, but that’s not impossible for a talented game-making team. The Egypt-set edition of the Assassin’s Creed game has shown that convincing cats and cat-luring/petting can be done well in 3D videogames. All the rest of a game could be left to those who wished to build their game on top of this base game-world. A basic starting point for a game could be that the Cats of Ulthar have sent emissaries into the real world, seeking Lovecraft’s help in the Dreamlands, but then find themselves mute and treated as normal cats. Lovecraft is the only one who can ‘talk’ to the Ulthar cats, but only partially — even he must collect old lore and folklore that will enable him to speak with them.
Such a faithful and authentic recreation would probably do quite well on Kickstarter or similar. Especially if it was: i) to be made by a reliable team with some RISD and/or Brown endorsement; ii) the end result would be be GPL’d (open source); iii) and it would be made with a major free game-engine such as Unreal.
