City of Signe, the next RPG Sleeping Citizen developer Gareth Damian Martin will make players parasites. Set in a brutalist, monochromatic Gotham on the brink of collapse, this entity will take control of various human hosts, directing their actions and accomplishing its own goals. When asked what cultural touchpoints inspired the self-described “fungalpunk” RPG, Martin points to their own British upbringing and the desire to “create something that would build on that identity and that history” – even if some of it might go over the heads of American audiences.
Before they started designing video games, they worked at a theater design company where they did previsualization work. One production involved Sting’s The last ship — a musical about the shipbuilding crisis in Newcastle in the 1980s. “There are these great photos of Newcastle in the 80s, of these huge ships towering over small terraced houses,” they recall. “I remember thinking at the time that this was science fiction in the past. There’s something really interesting about this moment in history when industrialization collapsed. It obviously casts a very long shadow over the UK.”
Martin imagined a 1980s northern British town in an alternate universe in a series of sketches for Inktober. “Since I dared to make the video game version of this (series),” they say. One of these drawings, titled “The Algae Burners”, represents a building that will appear in the game. For now, you can get a glimpse of it in Bookmark City first trailer above.
The Winter of Discontent, one of the most critical moments in recent British history, was also a “starting point” for Sign city. As Martin explains, it was both a “kind of union struggle” and an “ecological event.” Between 1978 and 1979, the UK experienced its coldest winter in 16 years, which coincided with nationwide worker strikes for better wages. The combination of these led to serious disruption in the economy and the downfall of the then British Prime Minister, James Callaghan, whose Labor Party lost the 1979 general election to the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher. A decade of Thatcherism would follow, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“In the UK, it’s really a key moment,” says Martin. “As almost all political dialogues are organized around what happened in the 80s.”
They were also inspired by British social photography from the 1980s and in particular the work of photographer Tish Murtha. Like Sting, Murtha had strong ties to Newcastle, where she spent much of her professional career photographing the city’s working class and marginalized communities. In his famous series on youth unemployment, Murtha documented the devastating effect of Thatcher’s free market policies on the north of England, and the resilience and ingenuity of the people the government had abandoned.
How do mushrooms fit into British history? However, incongruously, Martin also found inspiration in Tetsuo: The Iron Man. In the Japanese cult classic, a man is slowly overtaken by the machine, becoming a grotesque hybrid of metal and flesh. “The director was always strangely insistent that it was a superhero movie,” Martin says. Looking back, “it makes so much sense, because it’s about a powerless character who becomes powerful over time, but that process of becoming powerful is distorting and scary, and destroying like him to a certain extent.”
Abara — the 2005 manga by Blame! And Knights of Sidionia creator Tsutomu Nihei — was also a visual reference. “There are these first pieces in Abara where these big weird monsters are, that almost look like mushrooms, but they’re made of bones,” Martin explains.
As for the prose itself, Martin cites the literary works of New Weird authors like China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer. “I’m really trying to put the player in this position where they have to understand the world through this paradigm that is fundamentally inhumane,” they say. “When you have a host, you have your own goals as a parasite, and the host has its own life and what happens to it.” They decided to write the game from two perspectives: the parasite (in the second person, like a traditional RPG protagonist) and the third (the host’s thoughts). Martin’s goal is to produce a “layered quality” to the experience of navigating the game’s story. As a parasite, you will use a resource called emotion to affect the actions of your hosts.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person thinking about these things together,” Martin says jokingly of everyone. Bookmark City disparate influences, which, by their own admission, draw from sources that are in turn “very real and human” and more supernatural.
Players will get the chance to see how it all comes together hopefully next year. In the meantime, you can add a wishlist Sign city on Steam.
