Norco developer knows some people might be bewildered by its ending

Norco, from developer Geography of Robots, 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. Among the videos and recordings was a little side-scrolling game about a robot breaking into an oil refinery in Norco, Louisiana.

” It slowly evolved into a point and-click text adventure,” Yuts, a Geography of Robots designer 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.

Built from the side-scrolling robot 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.” Norco shares its name with its setting: Norco, Louisiana, a community within St. Charles Parish, a place backlit by a Shell oil refinery. 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 difficult to ignore .”

Ahead of Norco‘s full release in March, the game won the Tribeca Film Festival’s first-ever games award in 2021. And following its release, Norco is living up to that honor: The game has largely been a critical success, lauded largely for its unique story and honest depiction of the South. Polygon spoke to Yuts after Norco‘s release to talk about the game, its themes, and life in Southern Louisiana.

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

Polygon: Can you start by introducing yourself and your role in Geography of Robots and on Norco?

Yuts: I go by the pseudonym Yuts and I started this project in late 2015. This project was related to one I was working on with a friend. It was more an experimental geography and oral history project. We were conducting interviews and exploring archives, doing other things related to the geography of Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This was an experiment that used a variety of media, such as videos, recordings and montages. There were many things. And one of those pieces of media was a side-scrolling video game that followed a robot, an android, named Million, who was attempting to infiltrate the Shield Oil Refinery in Norco, Louisiana. That was a code base I had written in JavaScript. It was a JavaScript code base that I had created. Over the years, it grew to be a simple point-and-click text adventure. That’s how we got here today.

It probably took the form it has now in 2016 at some point. I had released an early, early demo that was largely the same. It contained what would be the first half of Act One of the game. 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. I was working with Gewgewly I, the composer of Norco, since 2015. He was also making music and doing a few other experiments. Since then, we’ve collaborated for quite some time. And then in 2020, Aaron Gray came on, and in summer 2021, Jessi Jacobi came on to help with pixel art, as well as fmAura. And that was also 2021. He did a lot of the sound design in the game. Many of the sounds you hear and environmental effects are his creations.

What made the video game genre a good medium for telling this particular story?

I was inspired a lot by older Japanese text adventures because they had an element of visual novels but were a little more interactive, a little more immersive. It felt like this multimedia or hypertextual way of investigating and exploring 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.

What was it like to design Norco, the place in the game, as this transient space knowing that it will eventually submerge, but right now is still standing?

I’ve said before that I don’t consider Norco to be a dystopian work. It’s up to the creator not to give genre labels. Other people will ultimately decide the genre of the game. I can only add my own personal feeling about it, which is that I tried to write it from a place of honesty. It wasn’t my intention to create something prescriptive. I wanted to write something that spoke to the reality of Louisiana as I had experienced it. As I do experience it, which, in many ways, there’s not much room for optimism. But there are glimmers of hope, glimmers of humanity.

Norco is attempting to capture a complex picture. As far as knowing that it will submerge, inevitably that the Mississippi River will change its course, I did want to address those feelings and the dire circumstances. 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 want to experience it. Louisiana has a unique quality that requires you to experience it. This is true of most things but it’s especially true about the Louisiana coastline.

Can you speak to the role the oil industry plays in both Norco the place and Norco the game? Can you speak about the role of oil industry in Norco and Norco?

I grew up several blocks from an oil refinery. Since I was young, I have been fascinated with it from a physical, material and aesthetic standpoint. It also exploded while I was a child, and our home was badly damaged. We had to flee. It’s a giant fire-breathing dragon, I believe I have said this before. It’s hard to ignore. This was something that attracted my attention as a child and has remained a fascination ever since. I’ve been intrigued by it on both an aesthetic and intellectual level for quite a while now. I went to graduate school for urban and regional planning, specifically to study the impact that petrochemical infrastructure has on the built environment in the river parish region of Louisiana. As a teenager, I used to go to shows. The first zine I made was a Xerox copy of a thesis on Norco. It was fun to hand it out at shows because it seemed so strange.

I think that part of it might be due to the media I was watching. I was reading all this sci-fi stuff and I was projecting that onto the refinery. It was novel to me from an early age, in a way other people might not have noticed. This subject has always occupied my attention. This has always been my intellectual focus. That’s just one reason. It has a physical impact on Louisiana’s environment in such a way that you can’t ignore it if your goal is to tell a comprehensive story about Louisiana. This must be dealt with.

One thing that struck me is how naturally the weirdo science fiction elements fit together with the smaller moments of reality. Can you talk about how those two work together and what it was like to blend these things to create Norco?

Some people will enjoy the game for that reason, while others might find it a bit too challenging. But the game, in many ways, is very stream of consciousness and freely associative. It pulls in elements of reality as much as it pulls in various genre tropes as the logic of the game sees fit. Each game has its own logic structure. This type of free association is what I believe was the core of all the design elements in the game. Mike Davis writes, among other things, about the critical geography of California. When I was young, he was one of the academics who were an influence on me. He used science fiction and popular culture tropes — Zizek also does this to some degree — to create intellectual understanding and analyze things using science fiction analogies.

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.

Where do you start in creating characters to put into these spaces?

A lot of this is based on personal experience and conversations. The game contains my dad’s fishing friends. There are many intimate relationships in the game that have been reflected or inspired by characters. And there are so many fascinating people. Louisiana is home to many different cultures. 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.

There is also element that is more collective, or archetypes of characters, created more collaboratively in our Discord. These elements are better reflected of the culture of Geography of Robots and Discord by collectively discussing 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.

Is there anything else you think is important to mention about Norco or the development experience or the team?

I don’t believe anyone is doing anything wrong with 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. The game does try to embed, to some degree, a resolution to everything that it presents in the game. In the third act, some of it may be a little bit obscure or hidden. This is because of design. This kind of design may not be for everybody.

Nonetheless, we value hearing all the feedback. We appreciate all feedback, regardless of how critical. Most of it has been very gracious. And I think appreciation really is what we’ve felt the most. Because I wasn’t expecting the engagement to so high, I have been running around on Twitter thanking everybody who has played this game. 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. We love the trolls too, but there are also other trolls. Thanks for hanging out.