Would You Survive a Medieval Road Trip?

Imagine you’re a medieval knight on the road from France to Spain, and a member of your party has possibly come down with plague. Would your next step be to leave them behind, take them to an infirmary, or ignore their symptoms and continue the journey?

In Pilgrimage Road, a 1980s-style computer game created by Getty curators and digital producers, you can find out how you’d fare on an arduous road trip, facing hazards like river crossings, bandits, and illness. The game won’t go easy on you: make riskier choices about how to deal with the challenges you encounter, and you may discover you haven’t survived the journey (cue video game death sound effect).

Visitors can play the game on a kiosk in the Getty Center exhibition Going Places: Travel in the Middle Ages through November 30, 2025. The game complements manuscript pages on view that depict reasons for medieval travel, modes of transportation, and examples of typical travelers. While many people in the Middle Ages never ventured farther than a 25-mile radius from their village, some did, and Pilgrimage Road vividly and often humorously shows what could have awaited them if they attempted a 620-mile journey in the late 14th century.

“The idea is for it to be fun, to work within some of the established stereotypes about the Middle Ages, and also self-consciously reflect them with a bit of a wink and nod to the audience,” says Larisa Grollemond, associate curator of manuscripts at the Getty Museum and cocurator of Going Places. “We understand what you think about the Middle Ages. Yes, there was probably a peasant. Yes, there was probably a knight. Yes, you would probably die of plague. Those things are worked in without being punchlines.”

1990s nostalgia

The idea to do a computer game based on medieval travel had already been floating around Grollemond’s head when planning began for Going Places (cocurated with former Department of Manuscripts graduate intern Ben Allsopp). As a self-described “elder millennial,” she grew up playing games like The Oregon Trail, Super Mario Bros., and Pac-Man. Now categorized broadly as 8-bit games (due to their processors, which could only handle 8 bits of data at a time), they exploded in popularity in the 1980s and ’90s. These games are characterized by blocky, pixelated art, electronic sound effects, and simple storylines and gameplay.

“My perception of difficult travel or arduous journeys was really shaped by my experience in the ’90s with these games, and I was actually shocked that no one had done a pilgrimage or medieval version,” she says.

This would be the first time in the 25-year history of the interpretive content department at Getty that an in-gallery touchscreen computer game (offered in English and Spanish) was produced.

"When the concept of creating a computer game was first proposed, I was both intrigued and energized," says Steven Gemmel, who leads the digital media team at the Getty Museum. "Over the past 25 years of producing interactive experiences, our team had never taken on a project quite like this. Developing a game pushed us to think in new ways about how visitors can engage with art and ideas. I am immensely proud of our team, and that Getty is offering a new kind of interactive experience that can spark curiosity with our audiences in ways we have not presented before."

Getting buy-in across the organization was made easier by the fact that so many people are nostalgic for those classic arcade-style games, notes Karen Voss, digital media producer for interpretive content at the Getty Museum. “Even when we had final reviews with leadership, they would drop into stories like, ‘I remember in college…’”

Planning the journey

Grollemond and Reed O’Mara, former Department of Manuscripts graduate intern, pored over medieval manuscripts and other primary sources to map out Pilgrimage Road. They decided to structure the journey around a popular trek in the Middle Ages that is still traveled today: the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Players begin in Toulouse, France, and end at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain (believed to house the relics of Saint James the Apostle). In the Middle Ages, travelers would also have stopped at locations along the route to see relics of other saints.

The Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage became so popular during the Middle Ages that travelers could collect souvenirs like badges and vials of oil blessed at the shrine, and they exchanged advice for dealing with various challenges encountered along the road. This advice was transmitted orally and published in texts like the “Pilgrim’s Guide.” These primary sources provided inspiration for challenges that arise during the game as well as “learning stops” players can click on to read more historical information.

“There’s a lot of advice in medieval texts about where to stay, where not to stay, what to do about robbers, and things like, ‘When you get to certain areas, there’ll be people with big sticks that will beat you unless you pay a fee’—or concerns over giant flies and difficult terrain,” O’Mara says. “Having these sources and using them to create events for players to encounter on the game’s trail, or weaving actual quotations into the game, was really fun.”

Players must choose to make the journey as one of three possible characters: a knight, an aristocratic lady, or a peasant—three general types of people who really did make the medieval pilgrimage. Each choice comes with different amounts of money and resources that reflect the various advantages and disadvantages the individuals would have had. For example, an aristocratic lady starts out with more money but is more likely to be attacked by bandits later in the trip.

The team created a story map that outlined every stop along the road, choices players could make, and the outcomes of each choice. Then it was time to build the game.

Bringing Pilgrimage Road to (digital) life

Kevin McGowan, digital media producer for interpretive content at the Getty Museum, built the game using Twine to generate the narrative structure and Vue.js to create the rest, in collaboration with Voss and Gemmel. McGowan also licensed premade 8-bit-inspired art and fonts, added some animation to the characters so they would “bounce,” and licensed sound effects reminiscent of classic 8-bit games.

Grollemond and O’Mara wanted the game to reflect not only how difficult the pilgrimage was but also that oh-so-common experience of “dying” in an 8-bit game. So each choice a player makes is coded with a percentage chance of success or failure that represents an estimated likelihood that the choice could lead to survival or death in the Middle Ages. “One of the main goals was for players to die a lot,” Grollemond says. “So we wanted it to be difficult to make it all the way through. But also, realistic in its difficulty.”

After the game ends, stats are displayed that show how much money you spent, how far you traveled, and how long your journey took.

“We’re trying to give visitors a real sense of their trip, because you spend five minutes playing the game, but that journey took your character 70 days,” McGowan says.

After an extensive review process (including 40 Getty graduate and post-baccalaureate interns playing the game and offering feedback), additional elements were added, like an Indiana Jones–style map that shows players where they are on the road.

McGowan admits that one of the biggest challenges of producing the game was limiting it to just five minutes. He says, however: “This was the coolest project to work on ever. It was so much fun getting to run wild with ideas.”

Finding the joy in medieval manuscripts

Pilgrimage Road may be set in the Middle Ages, but Grollemond hopes players see the similarities to their own modern journeys. Even in the late Middle Ages, people planned travel routes, stopped for food, and proudly showed off souvenirs they picked up along the way—things we all still do today.

“I hope the game will illuminate those really practical aspects of travel, like deciding where you will stay for the night, in a way that the objects on view might not,” she says.

The game’s producers acknowledge that wall labels—those paragraphs of explanatory text that accompany works of art on display—can be intimidating for museumgoers. Gamifying the museum experience can make the same information suddenly way more fun.

“If you just split up information on a screen and make people tap a few times, suddenly they want to learn,” McGowan says. “So I just hope people have fun and get to experience what this journey was really like 600 years ago.”