Welcome to the Gothic Archive wiki.
It is a compilation of knowledge about the universe of cRPG Gothic (2001) by Piranha Bytes. We cover:
- pre-release official promotional materials
- unreleased and abandoned ideas, documents and demos made by Piranha Bytes members
- book Schläfer’s Bann by Alexander Wittmann
- cutscenes, dialogues and booklet from the final release
Because the source material is so diverse and comes from various stages of development, major contraditions are present and expected. Making practical use of it requires coming up with some subjective interpretation and corrections. It is not in scope of Gothic Archive, instead we do that at docs.phoenixthegame.com.
Contributing
To contribute, submit a change (“pull request”) on GitHub. The easiest way to do this is the edit button in the bottom right corner of each page. After the change is reviewed by our moderation team, it will appear online. Your contribution will be credited in the commit history here. Content quoted on this wiki is Copyright 1997-2001 Piranha Bytes Software GmbH, Michael Hoge, Alexander Wittman and others. Our compilation and analysis are under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 - you agree that whatever you contribute may be used by anyone for free, as long as they credit you.
Speculation
Speculation on how to fix / elaborate on Piranha Bytes’ material is not welcome here. Please only quote, summarize or synthesize, and avoid including your original ideas that are not present in the source material. If you create fanfiction very closely based on material here and want to share it, you are welcome to do it on our Discord server instead.
Other games
We accept information from other Piranha Bytes projects, but only if it expands on ideas that first appeared during development of Gothic I, and is separated under sub-heading “Other Games”.
About us
We are a team of a few hardcore Gothic I fans who did not like the design direction the series took after Gothic I.
In our fan projects we are trying to extrapolate in the opposite direction. We analyze early and rejected ideas of Piranha Bytes, expand and build around them. We personally met with Mike Hoge who originally created the world and story design, and gathered additional pieces of material from other former Piranha Bytes members.
We need this wiki internally to ensure consensus on what is the possible scope of “pre-alpha-to-final Gothic I” canon. We make it public to benefit other Gothic nerds and fan projects in the making.