There are a lot of fountain pens in video games–you just may not have noticed them. Fountain pens, however small a piece of a game, signal something to the player: the time period, perhaps, or something about the person writing with it, though they could also simply be an item filling up space on a desk. I started noticing them more than six or seven years ago when I started using fountain pens in real life. Suddenly, they were everywhere in games. My friends send me screenshots of them whenever they see them.
I've been wanting to paint them for a while. I stopped doing art for a couple years, but I've started again. No better time than now, no?
In Red Dead Redemption 2, Arthur sets out to find a fountain pen for Mary-Beth when she mentions wanting one to write novels with. There's also a cigarette card with a fountain pen illustration hidden in a faraway cabin, and some fancy men use them during negotiations.
People use fountain pens in Hyrule, too. Purah, the Hateno Ancient Tech Lab director, takes notes with a simple red fountain pen in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In Hitman 2, a fountain pen becomes a weapon—much like anything else in the game. It's perfect to throw, but also explodes. Not quite something you'd want to write with. The simple black fountain pen in The Great Ace Attorney 2 is used to kill, too—a murder weapon most unassuming.
Similarly, the fountain pen in Final Fantasy XIV is a weapon, and a gorgeous one at that. One of Splatoon 2's weapons, used to dispense paint and not fight, is adorned with a fountain pen nib.
But my favorite of all is in Animal Crossing: New Horizons—a simple black fountain pen with a gold nib, paired with a bottle of ink. It looks like a Pilot Falcon, perhaps, with a bottle of Pelikan ink. And one of the frog villagers, too, apparently likes to collect them, just like me.
Chris Person
