The Design of Videogame Doors
A visual essay on the portals and posterns of games, from Doom and Portal to the looping hallway of P.T.
Doors are the punctuation marks of virtual space. There’s barely a game that doesn’t use them to pace its levels, deliver its vistas, and conceal its secrets. Yet the doors themselves are rarely the focus, tending to give way to the worlds they demarcate at the slightest press of the “use” key. We wanted to correct that, bringing to the fore the portals and posterns that have distinguished themselves across videogames. As Elizabeth says in BioShock Infinite’s closing chapter: “Look at that—thousands of doors, opening all at once. They’re beautiful!”
