Over on the CGS forums, I got asked this rather interesting question:

tis prompted me to write a reasonably lengthy look at where a|state came from, what my motivations were and so forth. And, after posting it at the CGS site, I thought it might be of interest to people here as well.

So here you go.

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Hmm, well, this could require quite a lengthy answer, so bear with me.

Start at the beginning...

a|state grew out of a handful of (amateurish and fairly shit) games designs, including a cyberpunk-style setting, based in London in 2035. This grew from my dis-satisfaction (circa 1990-91) with the cyberpunk games that were on the market and the fact that their settings were geared towards big guns, shiny technology and had bugger all to do with cyberpunk as I had read it in Gibson, Rucker, et al. Back then, it used CORPS for the game system.

Things evolve. The rain slicked streets and peeling wallpaper of London ceased to have much of an attraction after a couple of years of regular play, and the game was set aside. In fact, gaming in general was pretty much set aside for a fair period of time. Fast forward many years and I was considering doing a website based around a game setting I was noodling with in my head. It was a vaguely limitless, proto-cyberpunk, dark kind of environment that (at that point) only consisted of a few ideas and one defined area. The area was called Mire End.

The desire to do a straight-up, cyberpunky game vanished pretty quickly and I wanted to see what I could make all these ideas I had into. Scale back a little, make the city not limitless, just very big. But where would it by? Why would it be? Well, why not make that a mystery of the game that everyone can interpret in their own ways? Hmmmm. The Shifted: They are the spooks, spectres, the fearsome ghost stories of the place. And what's the place called? How about 'The City'? Because cities can be very anonymous, impersonal places, so why not make the name as anonymous and impersonal as possible? Things started to get on track.

Then I spoke to my good friend Paul, who offered to do a couple of pieces of digital art for the website. Excellent, I thought. the very first images were Luminosity Tower and the original picture of the Simils. The website grew and evolved. I wrote, Paul did art. Sometimes, the writing informed the art, other times, the art informed the writing. Very much a collaborative process. This is something important that people need to understand: from the very start, Paul has been an equal partner in the creative process that went to create a|state.

So, we decide to publish a game and, as they say, the rest is history.

That's some of the stuff, the very basic surface level behind the creation of a|state, but I get the feeling you want to know more? Well, OK then.

I studied History and Sociology at university, so the evolution of cities and their place in the human experience has always fascinated me. More than any other thing, cities are (to me) the very symbol of modernity, of industry, of the desire that sits in man to build and create. And the way they grow and evolve is utterly absorbing. Look at a railway cutting that slides through London, for example. You'll see brick arches leading off to who knows where, drainage tunnels, doors, detritus. Then, build on top of all this are houses made of brick and stone. Then churches with gargoyles and waterspouts. Towerblocks of grey concerete. Office buildings of glass and steel. The city builds up on itself, in layers, over the centuries. And this is fascinating. Why does this happen and how does this affect the way people live and how they look at their environment?

So translate this into a|state. The City has a maddening complexity, crazed architecture, arcane transport network and all this stuff because it is the ultimate expression of everything I find interesting in cities. Look at cities around the world and you will see bits and pieces that relate to The City. The canals of Manchester and Birmingham. The cathedrals of Paris, Chartres and Barcelona. The railways of Tokyo and London. The towerblocks of Glasgow and Warsaw. All of them spring up, in changed forms, in The City.

And then there is the influence of films and books. a|state brings together many things that I love in the cinema and in literature. There are the obvious lifts, the homages, the subtle allusions, they are all in there because we cannot (despite how strenuously some will deny it) escape the influences that surround us. So, we might as well use those influences, take what it good about them and use them to create something different. Characters, places and situations are reflections of things other people have created. Dickens, Conrad, Mieville, Peake, van der Meer, James, et al, all have their effect on what is written.

Non-fiction also exerts an influence as well (taking us back to my days of academia). The Contested Grounds are, in essence, the horror of Stalingrad compressed so that they sit inside a larger urban horror. Inferno is the epitome of the hellish mental institution, places that I've personally seen in abandonment and decay. Many of these thoughts and ideas stem from reading history, biography and other works of non-fiction. Read 'Stalingrad' by Anthony Beevor and you'll see exactly where the Contested Grounds come from.

That's it for now. I'll write more if you have any further questions or comments.

Cheers
Malc