History in video games invariably belongs to the present. In recent years, a major consensus in historical game studies holds that games almost always reflect contemporary reality—arguably operating within “only one era: the present.” (Kerschbaumer and Winnerling 2014; Seiwald and Vollans 2023; Wright 2022) This poses a central challenge: how should we understand and handle the ubiquitous anachronisms of games, while still identifying within them questions relevant to professional historical inquiry? Yet history has never been merely a record of what happened in the past. It is also a way of imagining possible worlds. Long before history became a modern academic discipline, the past already participated in the present’s understanding of itself through metaphor and warning. When people look back on history, they also imagine their own present as one possible world of an earlier age, searching there for lessons, abandoned roads, and paths that were never allowed to be taken.
The Roman Empire is perhaps the most persistent example. Generation after generation has aspired to become a “New Rome,” while asking why Rome prospered, why its Republic failed, or was captured and transformed into empire, and why the Empire itself ultimately collapsed (Hell 2019; Murphy 2007). Rome has therefore never simply receded into the past. It remains a persistent point of reference for thinking about political destiny. Classical and Late Antique studies repeatedly encounter arguments about Roman crisis, imperial formation, and decline, arguments that spill far beyond the academy into political discourse, popular entertainment, and science fiction such as Star Wars (Elliott 2014; Cyrino 2005; Charles 2015). Which Rome ought to be restored, preserved, or overthrown? What kind of Pax Romana might thereby be secured, and what sort of Roma Aeterna imagined? These perennial questions continue to refract modern anxieties over political order, national prosperity, and social conflict.
Similar metaphors are embedded in video games. Taking Fallout: New Vegas as a case study, this paper examines how the game reactivates this enduring Roman repertoire within a speculative future (Christopher 2025). The NCR presents itself as an imitation of pre-War America and, with it, inherits the American tradition of imagining the republic as a “New Roman Republic.” Caesar’s Legion, by contrast, constructs itself as a corrective to the consumerism, individualism, and corruption allegedly produced by that “democracy.” It seeks to become another Rome: a nationalist, statist, and centralized order that erases the identities of conquered peoples in the name of a new Pax Romana, promising durable peace and civilization through uncompromising political unity.
The Colorado River that Caesar’s Legion prepares to cross thus becomes another Rubicon. As with Caesar’s own crossing, the moment can be imagined as the “rescue” and reconstruction of a republic corrupted by aristocratic rule, while simultaneously marking the abandonment of the republic—and, increasingly, of civic traditions themselves—in the interests of imperial expansion and survival. Condensed into this single image are the later Empire’s turn toward monotheism, the sacralization of imperial rule, and the long succession of later polities that sought to become an “Eternal Rome” and to realize their own “Roman peace.” Yet the shadows of those traditions enter the game as well: total war, enslavement, cultural erasure, even genocide, together with forms of resistance that themselves draw upon Rome as historical metaphor and political inspiration.
As a metaphor of Roman history, then, New Vegas is simultaneously a metaphor of American history. The American republic fashioned its identity through resistance to empire—first and most obviously the British Empire. Slavery and abolition subsequently redefined the relationship among republicanism, citizenship, and freedom. After the Second World War, as the United States itself increasingly came to be described and imagined in imperial terms, the old anxiety over republic and empire returned with renewed force. New Vegas thus spatializes what Roman history narrates temporally. It places side by side processes that Roman history distributes across centuries, while also compressing into a single moment the many later variants of “Rome” and the longer, more complicated histories connecting them—much as political history, political thought, and popular historical imagination have repeatedly done. Why does a political community desire to become a new Rome? And why do Roman Republic and Empire seem condemned to wage an eternal war, both as political ideals and as their historical embodiments?
This paper therefore proposes a way of approaching history in video games that moves beyond identifying historical settings or tracing how modernity reshapes the past. Historians can also ask how particular historical epochs are condensed into powerful metaphors, and how anachronism becomes a means of working through contemporary anxieties. Through its openness to “possible worlds” and “possible pasts,” the video game offers an experimental space in which the present can repeatedly re-enter the past and reconsider political destiny, human choice, and unrealized possibilities—as people have always done when studying, invoking, and fighting over history.
Bibliography
Charles, Michael B. “Remembering and Restoring the Republic: Star Wars and Rome.” Classical World 108, no. 2 (2015): 281–298.
Christopher, Jordan Thomas. “‘Caesar’s Legion’ in Fallout: New Vegas: Re-enactment as Reception.” Classical Receptions Journal 17, no. 4 (2025): 365–383. https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/claf010
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Biography
Lu Yahuai is Associate Professor at Yangtze University in China. She received interdisciplinary training in Late Antiquity Studies and Patristics at the Department of History and the Center for Classical Studies at Peking University, as well as in the history and philosophy of science and technology at Peking University’s Department of Philosophy. She later conducted postdoctoral research in game studies at Beijing Normal University under the supervision of Espen Aarseth. Her research focuses on game history, historical game studies, and digital public history, particularly the relationship between games, media memory, and narratives of modernization in contemporary China.
Whilst I’d thought plenty about the Romanitas (or lack thereof) of the legion, weirdly – probably because the element of Caesar’s backstory that’s emphasised in the game is him as a unifier of tribes, he’s not an NCR military leader – I’d never really thought of the whole setup of FNV as being a mock-up of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. That probably should have been more obvious to me as an analogy!
And I agree there’s a lot of power in thinking about where we build contested spaces in this stuff: if you read e.g. Bret Deveraux’s writing on Rome, he’s very much writing public stuff on the Roman army in to push back on the Caesar’s Legion view of Roman history (and in consequence to win that contest over who owns Rome and what was good about it in favour of the values of the modern American republic). So I think the parallel there with real-world politics is very direct and has become more so since FNV was published.
I’ve got a couple of questions. The first is on the role of the developers, who very obviously get to constrict the sorts of possibility-spaces that gamers get to see. Does your understanding of games as carriers of Grand Metaphor change how we should think about their role? To what extent do games need to reflect the imagined conflicts around them to make their cultural comments impactful, and to what extent can they construct alternate reimaginings of those conflicts – for example, could you rewrite New Vegas, or write a post-game to it, that delivered a stronger structural critique of how the Legion works? How well does the TV show (which I’ve not seen) do when it kind of tries that?
The second question is getting back to the not wholly but slightly absent medieval. Does thinking about medieval interaction with and memorialisation of classical Rome help us to think about how these contests over New Rome can be framed? What about the role of Byzantium, which is increasingly being brought back into popular concepts of the Roman world but also, with that, is getting deployed at times as a way to present fascist ideas of a New Rome (and thus the brutality of something like Caesar’s Legion) in a more explicitly Christian religious framework? I don’t think these were particularly in mind when they were making New Vegas, but do you think they have the potential to change how its metaphors might be read in future?
Anyway that’s probably too much and too vague a set of vaguely question-shaped thoughts, but any thoughts you have I’d be interested to read 🙂