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How to make a Moscow
Mar. 20th, 2004 06:42 pmIf, for some reason, you ever need to make a video game set in Moscow, there are a few corners you can cut to save time.
Use a rally game template and select a ten lane freeway as your basic road. The whole city uses the same surface, so you won't need to make any cobbled streets or anything. Make your freeway gritty, border it with crusts of grey snow. The main colour you'll need is grey. Make some filthy rally cars with really bouncy suspension for the pot-holes. Above them, string some banner adverts and big billboards. However many adverts you just thought of putting, put twice as many. Remember that you're dealing with a communist society that's in the middle of some kind of weird 'return of the repressed' phenomenon. Moscow is so much more capitalist-looking than any western city that Muscovites, when they travel to Berlin, Paris or London, must feel like they've arrived in some sombre Stalinist state. Where are the fifty metre long Panasonic ads? Where are the placards advertising Elle and Vogue, where are the 'Win a million dollars!' banners? Even Texas strip signage must look restrained and tasteful by comparison.
If you want to save time you can take adverts from other games, but be sure and reverse the bitmaps so they look a bit Russian. Keep the logos the right way round, though. Do some nasty 3D logos and mashed up typefaces with drop shadows if you want to add local colour.
The sky is easy: a flat grey lockdown stretching from horizon to horizon. Map out plenty of space for your basic city template. Think of a reasonable city size, then double it. Think of a reasonable number of cars to put on the vast boulevards, then quadruple that and clog them in a huge, diesel-stinky jam.
For the buildings you're going to have to do a little work. Remember that this is the dominant city of a vast part of the Asian landmass, and the mix of influences has been pretty odd: mongol and greek and slavic and finnish, with a big dollop of communist utopianism thrown in from a recent 70 year brainstorming session themed around 'How to build a different kind of society, with different cars, buildings, planes, lamp-posts and space-craft from everybody else's.' You're going to have to make everything look... odd.
Start with an onion dome church template. Add a 'Soviet skyscraper' -- spindly, with a pointy spire. This can serve as a really old building from the 30s, or a pomo apartment block under construction, inspired by the pioneer version. Make a gigantic raked-back casino in disgusting shades of green with pink fluting. Make one Ikea (you'll be using it in two different locations). Make one boxy apartment block from the 70s, but be sure it's random-repeated hundreds of times along the main arteries with slightly different lozenge-shaped cream, yellow and brown mural decorations each time. For the centre of town, make a generic 1950s Stalin block like the ones on the Karl Marx Allee in Berlin, but without the loving nostalgic restoration.
Finally, you'll need some statues. Three should do: Marx, Lenin and Mayakovsky. Random-locate them and you'll get some funny ironies: Lenin rabble-rousing on a pedestal with a sporting goods store right behind him packed with western brands. Mayakovsky gazing into a McDonald's. Marx looking like a beardy tout for a nearby casino. Workers of the world unite and have a bit of a flutter tonight!
As for humans, you'll certainly need two old ladies in big fur hats, sitting in a bus shelter, chattering about how Putin is protecting their pensions. You'll need some policemen, also in fur hats, stopping the traffic at check points to search for drugs and Chetchen terrorists. Some very beautiful girls coming out of a Momus show, posing with Cheburashka for photos to accompany an article he's writing for Vice. Oh, and some very obvious prostitutes to solicit the customers at the bar of the Ukraina Hotel (a Soviet skyscaper, but twice as big) at three in the morning. Make your standard trampy campy prostitute in a really short skirt -- then half the skirt and double the camp.
That's pretty much how to make a Moscow. When you've got all your sprites and bitmaps ready, go into 'live' mode and hit play. Oh, and don't forget to make it snow.
Use a rally game template and select a ten lane freeway as your basic road. The whole city uses the same surface, so you won't need to make any cobbled streets or anything. Make your freeway gritty, border it with crusts of grey snow. The main colour you'll need is grey. Make some filthy rally cars with really bouncy suspension for the pot-holes. Above them, string some banner adverts and big billboards. However many adverts you just thought of putting, put twice as many. Remember that you're dealing with a communist society that's in the middle of some kind of weird 'return of the repressed' phenomenon. Moscow is so much more capitalist-looking than any western city that Muscovites, when they travel to Berlin, Paris or London, must feel like they've arrived in some sombre Stalinist state. Where are the fifty metre long Panasonic ads? Where are the placards advertising Elle and Vogue, where are the 'Win a million dollars!' banners? Even Texas strip signage must look restrained and tasteful by comparison.
If you want to save time you can take adverts from other games, but be sure and reverse the bitmaps so they look a bit Russian. Keep the logos the right way round, though. Do some nasty 3D logos and mashed up typefaces with drop shadows if you want to add local colour.
The sky is easy: a flat grey lockdown stretching from horizon to horizon. Map out plenty of space for your basic city template. Think of a reasonable city size, then double it. Think of a reasonable number of cars to put on the vast boulevards, then quadruple that and clog them in a huge, diesel-stinky jam.
For the buildings you're going to have to do a little work. Remember that this is the dominant city of a vast part of the Asian landmass, and the mix of influences has been pretty odd: mongol and greek and slavic and finnish, with a big dollop of communist utopianism thrown in from a recent 70 year brainstorming session themed around 'How to build a different kind of society, with different cars, buildings, planes, lamp-posts and space-craft from everybody else's.' You're going to have to make everything look... odd.
Start with an onion dome church template. Add a 'Soviet skyscraper' -- spindly, with a pointy spire. This can serve as a really old building from the 30s, or a pomo apartment block under construction, inspired by the pioneer version. Make a gigantic raked-back casino in disgusting shades of green with pink fluting. Make one Ikea (you'll be using it in two different locations). Make one boxy apartment block from the 70s, but be sure it's random-repeated hundreds of times along the main arteries with slightly different lozenge-shaped cream, yellow and brown mural decorations each time. For the centre of town, make a generic 1950s Stalin block like the ones on the Karl Marx Allee in Berlin, but without the loving nostalgic restoration.
Finally, you'll need some statues. Three should do: Marx, Lenin and Mayakovsky. Random-locate them and you'll get some funny ironies: Lenin rabble-rousing on a pedestal with a sporting goods store right behind him packed with western brands. Mayakovsky gazing into a McDonald's. Marx looking like a beardy tout for a nearby casino. Workers of the world unite and have a bit of a flutter tonight!
As for humans, you'll certainly need two old ladies in big fur hats, sitting in a bus shelter, chattering about how Putin is protecting their pensions. You'll need some policemen, also in fur hats, stopping the traffic at check points to search for drugs and Chetchen terrorists. Some very beautiful girls coming out of a Momus show, posing with Cheburashka for photos to accompany an article he's writing for Vice. Oh, and some very obvious prostitutes to solicit the customers at the bar of the Ukraina Hotel (a Soviet skyscaper, but twice as big) at three in the morning. Make your standard trampy campy prostitute in a really short skirt -- then half the skirt and double the camp.
That's pretty much how to make a Moscow. When you've got all your sprites and bitmaps ready, go into 'live' mode and hit play. Oh, and don't forget to make it snow.