How games imagine the past and future of solar energy

In the north tower of Castle Wewelsburg in Germany's Alme Valley there's a pillared chamber with a sinister design on the floor - a mottled, marble circle with two outer bands linked by 12 zig-zagging runic rays. This is the Black Sun, laid down in the 1930s at the orders of Nazi Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler. The Black Sun was part of Himmler's efforts to, essentially, devise a grand RPG backstory for the Third Reich: it links Nazidom to the sun heraldry of the Merovingian and Frankish empires, presenting Hitler's reign as the completion of a mythological narrative centuries in the dawning. It's also an occult symbol that is still in vogue among alchemists - and far-right activists - today. Quite how much credit Himmler gave the occult is debated - according to some, he fancied himself the reincarnation of the 10th century Saxon King Heinrich I - but he certainly understood the sun's power to dictate reality, treating its Nazified emblem as the gravitational centre of a new Aryan society and history.

You may know Wewelsburg as the inspiration for Castle Wolfenstein. Reinvented as a set of shooter levels, it has swelled and warped and flourished across generations of videogame hardware and creation tools, from the blue-walled labyrinths of 1992's Wolfenstein 3D to the campy, steampunk environments of the MachineGames reboots. Wolfenstein deals extensively with Nazi sun worship, plugging it into present-day discussion of the social transformations bred by new forms of energy. In the 2009 game by Raven Software, Black Sun motifs are portals to another dimension, the desolate former home of an alien race named for the real-life Thule Society of Nazi mystics.

As with human civilisations on Earth, the Thule rose and prospered by consuming and transforming the energies of their nearest star. It's the hidden power source for magical mechanisms in the game, such as the solar medallion that lets you shift dimensions. As their sun neared the end of its life, the Thule built a gigantic apparatus to harvest its remnants, with catastrophic results. The Nazis, naturally, are trying to succeed where those long-dead aliens failed. The Thule machine's wreckage is still visible looming over the game's final boss fight, spiralling around the dim cinder of the Black Sun itself – Wewelsburg's floor mosaic transformed with quintessentially videogame literalness into a deathly reactor capable of animating a new age of darkness.

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