Old and New Myths in Asterix Video Games

The Asterix comic series, which debuted in 1959 and continues today despite the deaths of its creators in 1977 and 2020, incorporates mythological elements from many cultures into its historically inspired world. Over time, it has laid the foundation for a popular multimedia franchise and a modern national ‘myth’ (Maguet and Touillier-Feyrabend 1998; Delcroix 2024). Although video games have been part of this expanding multimedia universe since the early 1980s (Blanchet 2022, 68), they have received little scholarly attention, with very few notable exceptions (see, e.g., Tarquini 2011 and Garin 2022). Intended as an exploratory study of a manageable selection of Asterix video games, this paper proposes to examine the forms and functions of the intertextual poetics of the comic books (Rouvière 2008) which is similarly at work in the video games, even though the latter do not always qualify as ‘medial transpositions’ (Rajewsky 2005) of the former. The proposed paper will specifically focus on three instalments in the ‘XXL’ series which, instead of transposing specific comic books, introduce entirely new characters and plotlines to the Asterix universe: namely, ‘Asterix & Obelix XXL 2: Mission Las Vegum’ (Étranges Libellules 2006), ‘Asterix & Obelix XXL 3: The Crystal Menhir’ (OSome Studio 2019) and ‘Asterix & Obelix XXXL: The Ram from Hibernia’ (OSome Studio 2022). Drawing upon previous discussions of myths in the comic series and its non-interactive adaptations, this paper will analyse the interrelated audiovisual, narrative and ludic layers of the selected games to shed light on the interweaving of old and new mythical elements across the three titles and show that, while the games under scrutiny contribute to reinforcing the mythical status of Asterix, they also produce new myths by parodically appropriating and adapting materials from different areas of contemporary popular culture, such as music (e.g., Radiogagax in ‘XXXL’, who is inspired by Freddie Mercury) and even video games (e.g., the many spoofs of game characters, objects and situations in ‘XXL2’)