PICTURE: The Kingdoms of Gaming

An illustration I made for the upcoming MUNKSHROOMS project. I also wanted to ask for your opinion on something here!

The astute observers among you may have noticed this was featured in the trailer I posted in here earlier. The idea here was to create a Tolkein-esque fantasy map, depicting the "big 3" video game console companies. It's a pretty basic visual; I would like to have gotten a bit more clever in how I depicted them but, to tell you the truth, I'm not super invested in the affairs of video game companies. I would say my design choices get less and less clever when going from left to right.

For Nintendo I gave them a Super Mario Bros. style castle fortress, with a large wall surrounding their serene meadow. I was thinking about how Nintendo kind of walls themselves off from a lot of industry trends and often create their own self-sufficing environment. There's a contrast of their beautiful, peaceful looking grounds, surrounded by an almost militaristic fortitude.

Microsoft... they have a big rectangular castle, that looks like the current massive Xbox console. When I think about Microsoft, something that came to mind for me was how I'm always hearing about them acquiring developers, so I included some smaller castle grounds. They're almost like smaller kingdoms that have been subsumed into the larger Microsoft territory.

And for Sony... I'll be honest, I was somewhat at a loss. In hindsight, since they're a tech company that makes all kinds of gadgets and devices and TVs and such, I probably should have given them some kind of futuristic sci-fi city, right? Instead my mind just kind of went to the FromSoftware, since those were the only popular PlayStation games I could think of that had any kind of castle imagery. So I just leaned into that. I might change it to the other idea, though. What do you think?

Actually, funny enough, I originally had drawn the castle from Crash Bandicoot for the Sony kingdom. It was late at night and, like I said, I'm not super invested in the affairs of video game companies, so in that moment, the castle from Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation 1 was the only Sony-related castle I could think of. And that isn't even really a Sony game anymore, it's Microsoft now! Remember that Activision buyout??

I say this is funny, because now I'm really contemplating changing it a second time.

What do you think? Bloodborne castle or Sci-Fi building? Which one is the better Sony representative??