Project timeline

The 1980s and 1990s – First wonders

Like many young geeks in Western Europe, I experienced a rather classic and happy period of wonderment with video games. After school, homework, adventures with friends in the park or in the forest of Fontainebleau, music theory, violin, gymnastics or karate lessons, we were allowed to watch films, television or play video games. In arcades, on NES and Super Nintendo, to begin with. Then came my cousin’s Amiga and our parents’ first PC, on which I experienced my first frights in a virtual world in Alone in The Dark; my first immersion in a cyberpunk universe in Syndicate; and my first dive into a world of poetic digital adventure in Little Big Adventure. Too demanding on hardware resources, I quickly abandoned the PC for the PlayStation 1, then the Nintendo 64.

1992: The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past – Observe and learn

My contemplative relationship with video games dates back to that early period of wonder, when I watched my older brother play The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, created by Shigeru Miyamoto for the Super Nintendo in 1992. My brother and I already shared a passion for cycling adventures, films and music; the desire for exploration, art and fiction were part of our lives. But seeing him embody the hero of an interactive epic on screen was something new. Watching him play was a new reason to spend time with my brother, and a new way of being a spectator. That’s when I began to appreciate video games for what they are: interactive fiction, capable of transporting us into new imaginary worlds, together and simultaneously.

1992: Alone in the Dark – Taking action and facing your fears

It was when I immersed myself in Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark that I experienced my first scares in a virtual world. Considered the first 3D survival horror game, it was one of the major inspirations for the Resident Evil series. This genre deliberately plays on our nerves, reactivating our species’ archaic fears: fear of the dark and of predators. Despite the monochrome screen and low-end sound card of our first PC, I plunged into this nightmarish universe with fear and enthusiasm. The desire to understand the mysteries of the story was ultimately more intense than the fear of progressing in the dark, equipped with only a small lantern.

Alone in the Dark made me rediscover the pleasure of playing at scaring myself, perhaps also helping to release certain unconscious fears buried in our Homo sapiens memories. Also, the pleasure of interacting with this horrific world was much more intense than the passive pleasure I already felt when watching horror films with my brother and his friends. Through the recreational use of a video game, I rediscovered the benefits of interactivity and taking action: being an actor rather than a mere spectator made the events more engaging and frightening, but also, and above all, more complex and satisfying to understand.

1993: Syndicate – Urban ugliness and brutality

The cyberpunk universe of Syndicate, created by Bullfrog, was my very first experience of a semi-open world game. It was a formative experience that shaped me into the gamer I am today. I was too young to be captivated by the storylines, and I wasn’t really interested in the missions. They mainly consisted of killing and destruction, set against a backdrop of power struggles between states and technology corporations.

It was the story’s setting that really caught my attention: a futuristic, cold, realistic and relatively ugly urban world. An ugliness typical of the large housing estates and dormitory towns built in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the ugliness of this environment, I took real pleasure in walking the streets, observing the scenery, the vehicles, the routines of the NPCs, contemplating with admiration this artificially recreated urban life. This curiosity was obviously rooted in my perception of the real world, acquired in a natural environment mainly filled with love for life, culture and fantasy.

1993: Syndicate – Curiosity and resilience

Despite its ugliness and violence, the world of Syndicate was where I first experienced contemplative pleasure in a digital world. I was already familiar with this feeling in nature, books, music and cinema; here I discovered a new space for contemplation, a new way of enjoying existence. I was aware that I was looking at a simple collection of cleverly arranged pixels, and yet the magic worked: I was there, with my imagination and curiosity fully awakened. It was these first fundamental, formative sensations that shaped my relationship with the virtual world and now allow me to explore fiction and the territories of cyberspace with genuine pleasure.

1994: Little Big Adventure – Frustration and imagination

The game Little Big Adventure also had a profound impact on me, even though I never actually played it. Our PC at the time didn’t have the SVGA colour screen needed to run it. I could only dream about it secretly, reading video game magazines. That didn’t stop me from having an indelible memory of it, quite the contrary. This frustration turned into creativity. This off-screen realm of the inaccessible, the promises of the narrative and the visual excerpts forced me to project my imagination. Without realising it at the time, I was discovering the artistic forces at work in video games, the same forces found in all works of the mind: invented worlds capable of transporting you, inside or outside yourself, through the power of imagination alone.

1998: Unreal – Virtual paradises and addictions

In 1998, as part of my studies, at a time when I was fascinated by Silicone Graphics (SGI) workstations, I upgraded my PC and played Unreal, developed by Epic Games. That’s when I discovered what ‘real’ real-time 3D computer graphics were like for the general public. Mesmerised, I would sometimes stop playing to enjoy the graphics, moving closer to the screen, incredulous, contemplating the objects and landscapes with the wonder of a child rediscovering the shapes of the world for the second time.

At that time, geeks like me were indeed facing a new world: high-definition 3D was no longer just a promise, but a reality, and we were all diving into an increasingly figurative representation of cyberspace, with no turning back. The most vulnerable became addicted; people suffering from emotional deprivation, with no escape and no place to wander or express themselves creatively, were and still are the most vulnerable. Today, as in the past, many people sink, without even realising it, into the abyss of these mirage worlds, responding to the siren call of virtual paradises.

The challenge during this formative period was therefore to learn how to strike the right balance between reality and geeker: to remain curious about this exciting new medium, while being wary of the promises of a new world based solely on the virtual. The most savvy geeks have therefore learned to navigate these new spaces with the curiosity of explorers, while keeping both feet firmly planted on the ship of reality, in order to continue living their lives and building their own stories.

1998: Half-Life – Video games and cinema

My second aesthetic shock in a 3D virtual world. Also in 1998, I discovered Half-Life, a new kind of video game, based on immersive storytelling, borrowing codes from cinema, featuring a revolutionary physics engine, and detailed 3D graphics. The willingness of taking screenshots was immediate. I took a little bit of everything : place, objects, interactions, scripted sequences. A basic shooting method, a rendering a bit raw, but the big picture of Virtual Tourism was born : I found a simple method to keep memory of my virtual experiences. See the album Virtual Tourism in New-Mexico.

2001 – 2004: Max Payne 1 & 2 – Action movie generator

A game brimming with pyrotechnic details that fully exploits the potential of ragdoll physics. As a fan of John Woo films since my teenage years, I enjoy playing and replaying totally improbable action scenes. Long before YouTube, during the early days of ‘Let’s Play’ videos, created by Marcus on the programme Level One on the French television channel Game One, I used a digital camcorder to capture slow-motion action sequences, showing the effects of light and objects when hit by bullets. I was thrilled. I never published these images, but the videos are still on the camcorder tapes, somewhere at my parents’ house.

2008: Fallout 3 – Art and technology

My third aesthetic shock in a virtual world, my first real experience of an open-world RPG, and my very first video game photographs. Wide landscapes, variable atmospheric effects. A so beautiful universe – perfect mix between art and technology, I had to take the landscapes in pictures, but it was impossible to take a screenshot here (on Xbox 360), so I took spontaneously pictures with an actual digital camera. The shooting method was transforming the picture surface, with a peculiar and paradoxical effect : the game looked more realistic, the trip memory much more “real”. See the album Virtual Tourism in Washington.

2010: Just Cause 2 – Horizontal and vertical exploration

The bigger map never created for 3D off-line open-world game; huge level design (exploration-oriented) on horizontal and vertical plan; jubilant physical engine sandbox like, virtuoso geographic and atmospheric effects. To sum up : the dream game to practice video games photography landscape-oriented. See the album Virtual Tourism in Island of Panau.

2011: Erwan Cario – The power of art critic

In September 2011, I discovered an article by Erwan Cario (a critic whom I have been reading since my first attempts at writing about video games), related to the photographic works of Iain Andrews. Before that, I didn’t see the point of publishing video game photos. Taking the photographs was enough for me: I captured the moment of play to better remember a nice ride in virtual spaces. These photos were just personal archives among many others, lost on my hard drive. They were even the product of a somewhat strange activity, difficult to explain, perhaps a little too geeky. An art critic had just updated my software, changing the way I saw things.

2011: Skyrim – At the edge of reality

After discovering Erwan Cario’s article, things quickly fell into place: I was publishing already some pictures taken during my real travel about architecture, design, location scouting; from now, within the same spirit, I could publish pictures from my virtual travel. My first published album was the virtual tour in the amazing Skyrim, certainly the bigger offline open-world game and the hugest interactive scenario I never played at this time. See the album Virtual Tourism in Province of Skyrim.

2016: Just Cause 3 – Car chase generator

In 2016, with Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause 3, I rediscovered the joys of contemplating a simulated world. It was the physics engine developed by the Swedish studio that caught my attention. The programme was so satisfying that I captured slow-motion sequences of explosions. The software allows for the destruction of large structures, such as bridges—a technical feat for the time, especially in such a vast universe. In my eyes, this game became the most beautiful digital representation of a game played by many children: playing with toy cars. Generating both car chases and stunts, it was a child’s imagination that finally took shape on the screen. Watch the video Virtual Tourism in Medici Archipelago.

2016 – 2020: In-game photography is mainstream

The games released in the late 2010s were numerous and rich in worlds to explore. Most open-world games now offer a built-in photography mode, catering to fans of the new popular art form that video game photography has become, now officially called In-game photography or Virtual photography.

2016 – 2020: URBEX – Virtual urban exploration

At the end of the 2010s, after deserting virtual worlds for a few years – already busy exploring new territories IRL – I resumed my virtual exploration, starting with urban exploration in the Boston of Fallout 4; then after in Wasteland’s desert of Mad Max, the San Francisco of Watch Dog 2, the city of Columbia in Bioshock Infinite, in the miraculous Middle Ages recreated by Polish studio CD Projekt, The Witcher 3; as well as in its very ambitious (perhaps overly) Cyberpunk 2077 – a virtual world and a simulation that did not leave me indifferent.

2018 – PS4 Pro: Rediscovering the past, imagining the future

Starting in 2018, after acquiring a PS4 Pro sold by a friend who ‘wanted to get rid of it because he was spending his life on it,’ I happily lost myself for a long time in Ancient Egypt of Assassin’s Creed Origins and its visionary “Discovery Tour” DLC; representing a Ubisoft’s major contribution to the creation of interactive documentary experiences and in the development of new methods for knowledge acquisition. I loved exploring the mysterious universe of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, a true ode to travel and the finest contemporary representative of adventure entertainment. I then discovered with great interest the dark and visionary universes of Detroit: Become Human, by French studio Quantic Dream, and Metro Exodus, by the Ukrainian studio A4Games.

2020: The Soulignac Brothers – Reconnecting despite restrictions

In December 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and severe travel restrictions, my brother and I were living 10,000 km apart. He was in Paris, while I was in Saigon (Vietnam). We began to wonder how we might see each other for the holidays despite these constraints. In previous years, I would usually travel physically for the holidays, by plane, thereby generating an excessive and unreasonable amount of carbon emissions. We could also have chosen to connect through voice or video calls. But since we both shared a passion for video games and new technologies, and had previously collaborated on the GTA 4 episode of the Virtual Tourism series (Los Angeles vs Los Santos), we simply decided to meet up in our favorite video game: Red Dead Redemption 2.

2025: New territories – Exploring cyberspace

Until then, the Virtual Tourism Project, dedicated to the contemplative way of gaming, had been a very solitary project; in 2020, it became a family matter, a collaborative project between brothers sharing the same passion. The objective was simple: to reunite despite the mobility restrictions, to talk, to have fun, and to try to preserve a tangible memory of that moment. This simple idea gradually evolved into a video project, in the spirit of “Machinima,” which can now naturally be found on our YouTube channel.

2026: New rituals – The real potential of video games

Over the years, the Virtual Tourism project has become a poetic writing and research project that attempts to document the emergence of new rituals within virtual worlds, whether or not they are a response to changes in the real world. Presented now as a series of logbooks, this project is always evolving, freely written, shaped by the shifting boundaries of cyberspace and ongoing discussions about the metaverse’s possibilities. Learn more about the collective The Soulignac Brothers and discover all our travel.