Work continues on
A Game of Class & Race, the retro RPG inspired by Marxist political theory and the 1982 video game
Ultima II. Today, I’ll be talking a little bit about the setting of the game. Instead of going for a generic fantasy world, I’ve decided to base things in Bristol and the South West of England in the early 1990s.
As I said last time, the reason I want to make a game combining Marxism and
Ultima II is not because I’m a Marxist (I’m really not), but because I’m fascinated by the abstraction of complexity that takes place within both Marxist philosophy and old school RPGs.
That maybe (kind of) explains the influence of Karl Marx and old school RPGs in general. But why
Ultima II specifically? Partly because it’s one of the most ambitious video games ever made (the player can explore an entire planet, as well as travelling back in time and visiting outer space and alien worlds), but that’s not the real reason. The real reason is because it was so unbelievably, unapologetically weird.
The early Ultima games were a batshit crazy stew of
Dungeons & Dragons,
Star Wars, and childish references to cold war politics and 1980s culture. Players drove around medieval cities in hovercars, shooting orcs with phasers and slicing up warlocks with their light sabres while visiting McDonald’s restaurants. Unlike most RPGs,
Ultima II is set not in some cookie-cutter fantasy world, but on a demented version of our very own planet Earth.
Video games today are often made by huge teams of people, sometimes with budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the 1980s, games were not uncommonly the work of a single person coding in their spare time on a shoestring budget. The designer often put references to their friends and family into their games, as well as in-jokes and terrible political gags (in
Ultima II, for example, the guards have nothing to say except “Pay your taxes!”). This wasn’t quite the bedroom game designer as “auteur”, but it meant that early games were intensely personal creations.
I’d like to replicate this mix of weirdness in
A Game of Class & Race. I grew up in Bristol in the 1990s, so that’s what I know. It seemed like a logical place to set the game.
P.S. As well as being a thing of beautiful strangeness,
Ultima II was also a rubbish game (unlike
Ultima I, which was ace). I’m going to try my best NOT to replicate this aspect of the game.
P.P.S. Check out some of the classic beasties you’ll encounter below