Seattle is about to receive a face-lift. No, I don’t mean the avalanche of new apartment complexes currently overtaking the city, or the surge of artisanal furniture stories popping up around the hill. On March 21, the new Playstation 4 game infamous Second Son will be released. The game, which features a super-powered protagonist fighting off a totalitarian police state, will take place in a new, neon-saturated version of Seattle.
Game developer Sucker Punch decided that Seattle was the perfect setting for their new game—the third in the series, though it features a new protagonist—which follows hero Delsin, a young man living in the city who, after contacting one of the series’ Conduits (humans who have obtained super powers that they channel from their environments) becomes one himself and sets off to evade the Department of Unified Protection, a government police force hell-bent on getting rid of Conduits.
Sucker Punch is located in Seattle, and the game has a number of city landmarks dispersed throughout the otherwise fictional world. The Space Needle, Elephant Car Wash, and monorail (though I’m not really sure who think “monorail” when Seattle comes up in conversation) are all present, as well as a new, amped-up crocodile lounge and a number of coffee shops. The game will also feature a lot of rain (because I guess that particular caricature of the city is still going strong) and local flora and fauna.
In honor of our city’s return to the virtual realm, I have complied a list of a few other notable games that featured the Emerald City as their playground.
The X-Files Game (1998)
That’s right. Seattle’s streets were once glorified in an X-Files game. Unlike the other games on this list, the Seattle in this game is the actual city itself, filmed in the nineties. The game is a point-and-click mystery adventure about an FBI agent named Craig Willmore who has been tasked with investigating the disappearance of the series’ protagonists, Mulder and Skully in Everett. The game was hailed by some, while others despised the fact that it was seven-disks long on the PC and only featured brief appearances by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. Also it’s live action point and click adventure. Who likes those?
Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003)
In the sequel to the widely acclaimed Deus Ex, players get to visit Seattle as Alex D, a futuristic soldier forced to traverse the country after a cataclysmic terrorist attack that destroys Chicago. He eventually travels to a futuristc Seattle that is under the control of a futuristic and fascist World Trade Organization that has separated the city into two distinct communities. “Upper Seattle” located higher up in the city’s expansive skyline, is home to the rich and power, while the denizens of “lower Seattle” accessible by a giant elevator called the “inclinator” are left to suffer poverty and crime. A future Seattle starkly separated between technologically advanced elites living in skyscrapers and a working class left to scrounge in the rubble beneath them? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Deadlight (2012)
Deadlight is a sidescrolling survival horror game where players take the role of Randall Wayne, a park ranger who, after losing track of his family during the zombie apocalypse, sets out for Seattle in a last attempt to find them. The scenery here—which usually sits as a backdrop to the action—is a dilapidated 1986 version of Seattle. Long freeway overpasses sit, gray and foreboding, above long strips of overgrown weeds, the skyline looks largely the same, though with large clouds of smoke hanging out of bombed sections of the skyscrapers, and later parts of the game take place in the city’s industrial section which, unsurprisingly, looks much the same during the end of the world as it does in real life.
