[Throughout this project, I will be handing over this space to the viewpoints of others for guest posts. The idea for a project like this was a joint one between me and my brother Martin. It was writing guest posts for his currently-dormant and less chart-based version that got me going on writing and convinced me to do the one you’re reading now. In a reversal of roles, here is a guest post from Martin.]
In the high-octane thrill-a-minute world of adventure game production studios, the big names, the Blur and Oasis, are LucasArts and Sierra. LucasArts, we have talked about in some detail before. Sierra, meanwhile, are best known for their King’s Quest series, which did the same kind of genre pastiche as LucasArts, only replete with multitudes of arbitrary death traps, usually accompanied by groan-worthy puns. Indeed, LucasArts pointedly made their first Monkey Island game as a direct reaction against elements of Sierra’s philosophy that they (correctly) deemed to be anti-fun, including a moment fairly late in the game where stepping on a certain patch of ground causes main character Guybrush to fall down a cliff and plummet seemingly to his death, accompanied by a pitch-perfect parody of the typical Sierra death scene, only for him to bounce back up and simply declare the immortal words “Rubber tree.”
But, like Blur/Oasis, like Commodore 64/ZX Spectrum, the Sierra/LucasArts divide is a false dichotomy, and other possibilities exist – like Simon the Sorcerer, Discworld, and Broken Sword, all fondly remembered series with their own spin on the genre. The last of those, in particular, while not wholly lacking a sense of humour, stood out from the crowd by taking itself a little more seriously than any of the others. At times it came across a little melodramatic, and I was never as fully engrossed in the adventures of George Broussard as I had been by those of Guybrush Threepwood, but I enjoyed them enough to finish both of the first two games in the series. Anyway, before they got to Broken Sword, the company behind it – Revolution Games – released a little game by the name of Beneath a Steel Sky for the Amiga, receiving considerable acclaim at the time.
I’d never played it before I started playing through old popular games, in a similar way to Syndicate, with which it shares a dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic and little else. Beneath a Steel Sky, as it turns out, is something of a minor classic. And humour is certainly a key component – like Broken Sword, the game doesn’t have the kind of self-referential knowing winks that characterise the likes of Monkey Island, but that doesn’t stop it from having moments of hilarity.
There is a specific moment in the game that I think best exemplifies this – a moment where I literally threw a literal spanner into the works of one of the machines that power the all-powerful and evil corporation that governs the world of Beneath a Steel Sky, halting a conveyor belt transporting pipes through a factory. See, there’s a man named Potts in this factory, whose job it is to inspect the pipes that come past on the production line and ensure that they are up to standard, and his response to this obvious act of sabotage is to pretend he hasn’t noticed. His job, he reasons, is to inspect the pipes that come past, nothing more. If the pipes suddenly stop coming past, it’s not his job to investigate why, so he will simply stand and wait for pipes, thus, technically, continuing to fulfill his duty to inspect every pipe that comes past him.
Douglas Adams was an influence on LucasArts and even worked with them on Labyrinth, but Beneath a Steel Sky nails its colours even more squarely to the mast of his style of humour, making petty and small-minded bureaucracy the butt of all its best jokes. This comparison is helped along even further on the CD version by the rather idiosyncratic choice to have all of its characters save protagonist Robert Foster and his robot sidekick Joey talk in a variety of regional British accents, despite the game being explicitly set in a future Australia. But it’s the biting cynicism and quiet fury at utterly pointless injustices that Beneath a Steel Sky really shares with his work.
The lovely moment I described comes shortly after you meet Potts’ boss, Gilbert Lamb, a pompous, self-important bully who dresses like a football manager and unironically says things like “Don’t you know who I am?”. Lamb is introduced in a scene where he berates another employee, Anita, for the crime of making conversation with Foster instead of conducting her tedious and seemingly pointless work in dead silence, and punishes her by making her work around radioactive materials without wearing any kind of protective equipment, because she is a ‘D-Linc’ and therefore has no rights in this world. Which, in its needlessly cruel and callous disregard for her well-being… hardly even feels like satire right now. Just the other day I was reading about how there is no safety warning tape on Tesla factory floors, because Elon Musk “doesn’t like the color yellow”. That’s the thing about the hypothetical futures of the cyberpunk dystopias of this era. There’s no way for any of them to be more horrifying than the actual future we are living in now.
The thing that Beneath a Steel Sky reiterates, time and time again, is that people living in cyberpunk dystopias are all too willing to look the other way as the grinding engines of oppression continue to crush lives into dust, so long as they personally aren’t the ones being crushed. Potts isn’t some hero of the people. He isn’t pretending not to notice the halt in the production line as an act of defiant rebellion. He just doesn’t care. And, more to the point, he is in the privileged position of being able to not care; he knows that as a white male (or ‘non D-Linc’ if you prefer) he can totally slack off with little more than a slap on the wrist. And it’s not just Potts – almost every character you meet throughout the game displays incredible indifference to the fact that they live in a nightmarish dystopia – not a lack of awareness, just a lack of resistance. Everyone you meet in the game, save for Anita – the one person directly in the firing line – is the same, with even Foster, your player avatar, not exempt. That’s the point. We are all complicit.
Gallup Amiga chart, Amiga Format, June 1994
