Norco developer knows some people might be bewildered by its ending

NorcoGeography of Robots developer is born out of an experimental, multimedia project that started around 2015 — a series of oral history interviews, archival deep-dives, and video projects, all related to Louisiana’s geography following Hurricane Katrina. A side-scrolling video game was created about how a robot broke into an oil refinery located in Norco (La.).

“It slowly grew into a point-and-click text adventure,” Geography of Robots developer Yuts told Polygon. “And that’s what we have today.” Yuts uses the pseudonym — “a derivation of [his] grandpa’s nickname” — to keep space between his life and the game’s world, which has some “slightly autobiographical details.” The rest of Geography of Robots, the collective of developers that made the game, includes developer Aaron Gray, artist Jesse Jacobi, and music and sound designers fmAura and Gewgawly I, who came on in 2020 after publisher Raw Fury signed the game.

This was built from the robot side-scrolling game Norco is described by Geography of Robots as a “Southern Gothic point-and-click narrative adventure” set in South Louisiana, its “sinking suburbs” and “industrial swamps.” NorcoIt shares the same name as its location: Norco in Louisiana is a small community located within St. Charles Parish that has been lit by a Shell oil refining plant. It’s where Yuts grew up, several blocks from an oil refinery, one that exploded and “somewhat wrecked” his childhood home.

“It’s this giant, fire-breathing dragon that exists in your backyard,” Yuts said. “It’s hard to ignore.”

Get ahead of Norco’s full release in March, the game won the Tribeca Film Festival’s first-ever games award in 2021. After its initial release, Norcoit lives up to the honor. After Yuts’ death, Polygon interviewed Yuts. Norco’s release to talk about the game, its themes, and life in Southern Louisiana.

Image: Geography of Robots/Raw Fury

[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]

Polygon: Please introduce yourself, your position in Geography of Robots, and any other relevant information. Norco?

Yuts: Yuts is my pseudonym and this project was started in 2015. The project had some connection to another project I was involved in with a good friend. It was more an oral history project and experimentation in geography. The project involved conducting interviews, exploring archives and other related work on the Louisiana geography after Hurricane Katrina. The project was experimental and included a wide range of media outputs, including recordings, videos, and montages. There were many things. One of these media pieces was a side-scrolling game in which a robot named Million tried to invade the Shield Oil Refinery at Norco, Louisiana. It was JavaScript code that I had created. The code was modified and reworked over time, and eventually it became a text-based point-and click adventure. And that’s what we have today.

It likely took this form in 2016, at one point. An early demo was released that was almost identical. The demo included the first act of Act One. I’d been working on it since then. In 2020, after signing the contract with Raw Fury, I’d gotten Aaron Gray on board, who’s the other developer. Gewgewly II, composer of the song “I was in the middle of it all.” NorcoSince 2015. Since 2015. We’ve been collaborating for a while. Then Aaron Gray arrived in 2020 and Jessi Jakobi joined the team in summer 2021 to aid with pixel artwork as well as fmAura. That was 2021. A lot of sound design for the game was done by him. He is responsible for many of the sound effects and other sounds that you can hear.

Why is the videogame genre such a useful medium?

Because they were visually novel-like, but also had interactive elements that made them more engaging and immersive, I found older Japanese text adventure to be very inspiring. I felt it was a hypertextual or multimedia way to explore and investigate something. So much of the observations that I was making about Louisiana’s landscape at the time were intimately tied in with a lot of pop culture and postmodern representations of disaster — you know, Norco being similar to Midgar. These analogies being present in pop culture media meant that video games feel like a natural extension of my research.

Image: Geography of Robots/Raw Fury

How was design like? NorcoThe place that is in the game. It’s a temporary space, knowing it will soon submerge but for now, it stands.

I’ve said before that I don’t consider NorcoIt must be a dystopian novel. But I know that it’s not up to the creator to assign genre labels. It will be decided by others who decide what the game should look like. It is my personal opinion that it was honest. I didn’t want to write something prescriptive. It had to reflect the realities of Louisiana, as it was for me. As I do experience it, which, in many ways, there’s not much room for optimism. However, there are still glimmers for hope.

Norcois trying to capture a complicated picture. It is certain that the Mississippi River will eventually change its course and it will sink. I wanted to express my feelings about that. But it’s still home and still a place that I love.

It’s, in a way, being present. This is something that’s also true in my own life right now, which is that me and my partner have been living in central Virginia because she got a job up here. We’re moving back to New Orleans this summer after being away for a few years and knowing that it’s not necessarily a place we can settle, or it’s not a wise investment to stay there long term, is a difficult thing to factor into decision-making. We want to stay there for at least a few more years. We desire to be there. There’s something inherent in Louisiana where you have to be present, you just have to enjoy what you have because it’s not going to be there forever. And that’s true for most things, but especially true for the coastline of Louisiana.

What role does the oil sector play in Norco? NorcoThe game? What was the significance of including that background in this story?

Growing up a few blocks away from an oil refining plant was where I grew. I’ve been fascinated by it on a material, physical, aesthetic level since I was a kid. It also exploded while I was a child, and our home was badly damaged. We had to flee. I think I’ve said it in the past, but it’s this giant, fire-breathing dragon that exists in your background. It’s hard to ignore. It kind of forced my attention from a young age, and I’ve been fascinated by it. I’ve been intrigued by it on both an aesthetic and intellectual level for quite a while now. To study the effects of petrochemical infrastructure on the built environment within the Louisiana river parish, I attended graduate school in urban and regional planning. When I was a teenager and I was going to shows and stuff the first zine that I ever made was actually just a Xerox of someone’s thesis about Norco. Like handing it out at shows just because I thought it was so bizarre … I grew up there but I never took it for granted.

Image: Geography of Robots/Raw Fury

Part of it might be due to the media that I was exposed. All this sci-fi material was what I was reading and that was projected onto my refinery. I found it to be novel from a young age in a way that other people maybe didn’t. I was always drawn to it. It’s always been the center of my focus intellectually. So that’s one reason. The other reason is that it does physically impact the environment of Louisiana in so many ways that it’s impossible to ignore if you’re going to tell a panoramic story about Louisiana. This must be dealt with.

It struck me how easily the strangeo science fiction elements blended with smaller parts of reality. Could you please talk about these two elements, and the experience of blending them together to create? Norco?

The game, for better or worse, some people are gonna enjoy it for this, and some people might really … it may test their nerves. In many ways the game is very stream-of consciousness and free to associate. The game pulls elements from reality, as well as genre tropes. Each game has its own logic structure. From the beginning, I feel that this type of free association was central to the design of the game’s elements. I don’t know if you’ve read Mike Davis, he writes about critical geographies of California and other things. He’s among a group of academics that were influential to me when I was younger who used — and Žižek does this to a degree as well — science fiction and pop culture tropes to construct an intellectual understanding of something and analyzed things through the science fiction analogies, whether it’s Star Wars or Phillip K. Dick.

Norco the game is rooted, at least in part, in some academic research, but academic research that has gone to an extreme of using analogy to depict what’s happening, and also communicate emotional truths that can be difficult to communicate through simple, mundane observations.

How do you create characters for these spaces?

Many of the ideas are based on personal experience, and conversations with others. In the game, my father and his fishing buddies were encoded. And so there’s a lot of very intimate relationships that are reflected, at least to some degree, or have inspired characters in the game. You will find so many amazing people. There’s also moving through different worlds in Louisiana. The punk stuff was always such a stark contrast to the more familial relationships that I had in the river parishes outside of New Orleans, or friendships I had developed with people who didn’t have any of the subcultural baggage. That diversity was what I sought to discover.

You will also find elements that are more shared, or, I should say archetypes of characters created more in the Discord. They are more representative of our culture of Geography of Robots and Discord simply by collectively sharing ideas. I wrote the script, ultimately, but a lot of it was flavored by conversations that I’ve had with other members of the collaborative.

Are there any other things you feel are important? NorcoOr the experience of the team or its development?

I don’t think anyone’s getting anything wrong about the game. All of the takes I’ve seen have been true to the person writing it. I love hearing people’s interpretations. There seems to be some division between people who enjoyed the end, or the third act in general, as well as people who find it confusing or irritating. You get strong reactions to it. To those who are not able to understand, I can only say that I fully comprehend it. I think it’s a reasonable feeling to have. To some extent, the game attempts to provide a solution to all of its problems. Some of the information may not be obvious or completely hidden in the third act. This is because of design. And that kind of design isn’t for everyone.

We appreciate all feedback. Most of the feedback has been really gracious, and we appreciate that deeply, even when it’s critical. And I think appreciation really is what we’ve felt the most. I’ve been running around Twitter just thanking everyone who’s playing the game, because I didn’t expect engagement to be as high as it has been. And this is the first large public facing project that I’ve personally been a part of, and the fact that people are engaging with it, and also sharing their emotional experience of it and willing to discuss it and take the time to do so is rewarding. You know, there’s also trolls, we love the trolls, too. Thanks for hanging out.