‘By Toutatis, I didn’t know they said that in Hibernia!’: The Representation and Localisation of Otherness in Asterix Video Games

Abstract

The Asterix multimedia franchise continues to expand across media, as a wide range of new cultural artifacts appear that feature the popular characters from the comic book series created by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo in 1959 and still ongoing after their respective deaths in 1977 and 2020. Only some of these products tend to receive critical attention, however. For example, Asterix video games are rarely discussed in scholarly studies, one notable exception being a contrastive analysis of the English and Italian versions of ‘Asterix at the Olympic Games’ (Étranges Libellules 2007) (Tarquini 2011). Unlike the latter, which is based on the 1968 comic book and the 2008 live-action film with the same title, more recent games, such as ‘Asterix & Obelix XXL 3: The Crystal Menhir’ (OSome Studio 2019) and ‘Asterix & Obelix XXXL: The Ram from Hibernia’ (OSome Studio 2022), introduce entirely new characters and plotlines. Positioning the player as an indomitable Gaul who thwarts Roman expansionist ambitions in a variety of geographical contexts, these games often stage Asterix and Obelix’s encounter with characters of different ethnicities. If the comic books rely on national stereotypes for characterisation purposes, Asterix video games similarly deploy various strategies of linguacultural othering, which arguably contain the subversive power of these interactive narratives of anti-colonialism. This paper proposes to analyse the representation and localisation of otherness in the English and Italian versions of ‘XXL3’ and ‘XXXL’. Crosspollinating postcolonial game studies with game localisation research, my study will highlight important similarities and differences in terms of linguacultural othering between games and between different versions of the same gam