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I want to take a moment and talk about why this random Book Fair game from 2003 has been stuck in my head long enough that I want to make a spiritual successor.

I grew up in the age of Frutiger Aero, a design style that was all about bubbles, nature, water, dolphins (for some reason), and rounded, colorful, see-through technology. It was optimistic and excited about the future and the natural world. Atlantis Underwater Tycoon was an amazing confluence of a lot of these ideas, being filled with, obviously, water, nature, and bright, rounded, futuristic technology. Underwater cities were a shorthand for how I expected the future to be when I was an optimistic, idiot kid.

Since then, my idea of underwater cities has been re-contextualized. Bioshock was my next brush with the idea of someone building an underwater city, but this time it was a city built to champion selfishness. This also made me think about the type of people who might want to go through the effort of building a city. It led me to learn about company towns built specifically to trap and control workers, towns that get taken over by Libertarians and crumble, stupid towns out in the desert built from shipping containers by tech bros, and of course, tech bro doomsday bunkers. (Authors note: This game could have easily fallen down that side and been a darker comedy, but I decided to stick to the positive)

My idea of someone who would want to make their own city underwater morphed from an adventurous, industrious, future-oriented person to someone who is such a pain in the ass that they can’t fit into an existing city, and someone so naive and arrogant that they believe they can instantly and effortlessly pull off creating something intricate with no experience or expertise.

Sort of like the idiot who thinks they could just throw together a city-builder on a whim.

I am sick of tech-bros and libertarians deciding our future. I want to remind people of the future we were promised before 9/11 and the 2008 crash. I want to revive the optimistic and shiny future from Zenon, Demolition Man, and incredibly uncomfortable inflatable furniture.

So, I am trying desperately to contain my sarcasm and cutting all my darker ideas for this project. I want players to build a functional and decent society, and hopefully internalize some of that and reproduce it in their actual communities.

Also, more people should start wearing those weird, over-head Oakley’s again. We were promised a cooler looking future and now we’re all dressed like Sears models. And the Kickstarter is still going for a few more days. It’s already funded, but you can secure yourself a future Steam copy for $1.