11/25/2023 0 Comments Kentucky route zero quotes![]() It's an inescapable force in the game world. "As dark as it gets, this game is largely about people and their relationships, so there's always some joy in there." – Cardboard Computer ![]() "Our experience is pretty typical: student loans, medical bills, confusing credit cards, stuff like that." Chances are you, assuming you're an under-30(something) reader of VICE, have a relationship with it, too. So the characters are living in the world of predatory lending and bizarre, inscrutable financial machinery."īut if there's one thing to unify the characters inhabiting the world of Kentucky Route Zero, it's their relationship to debt, "this weird immaterial power that constrains so many of us" as the team refers to it. "It's important to us that the game be in, and of, the real, contemporary world. Despite the surreal and often fantastical flourishes that emerge throughout the game, it's still rooted in the seemingly mundane struggles we all experience. Conway's antique business is on its last legs the farm of Weaver's parents was repossessed due to debt repayment issues and the lease on Shannon's TV repair workshop was suspended. Putting in these little cues is part of this broader gesture." "Yeah, I think we try to position Kentucky Route Zero as part of some of these earlier traditions. Steinbeck's there, but so is post-Depression literature more generally. That response, Elliott later explains, was a play on the Steinbeck quote: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." It's reflective of their desire to connect the dots, to layer and interpolate the work of their forbearers into the game's idea of America. "Yeah, that may be a political position we take in this game," they reply, before adding: "The 2008 financial crisis and recession aren't temporary embarrassments but totally consistent with post-industrial capitalism." I ask Elliott, Kemenczy and Babbitt if drawing out these connections was a conscious process. But the game also draws on more distant depressions, to previous hard times of the 20th century. Businesses are failing and families are being displaced by the banks people are fucking struggling. Cardboard Computer's version of Kentucky, like much of current America, is littered with foreclosure signs. KRZ, then, feels like a response to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. A Republican, and part of the Tea Party movement, he's looking to systematically demolish Kentucky's own abortion clinics and roll back the advances of Obamacare, both initiatives that give the economically vulnerable choices, choices that have dwindled over the last ten years. ![]() They do, though, use the question as an opportunity to dig into "Kentucky's own rich, right wing 'outsider' in power," the current Governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin. It's hard to imagine how the context of his noisy political career might have changed our work." Fair enough, guys. "Most of Kentucky Route Zero's development happened while Trump was just another serially-bankrupt, racist, real estate developer with a reality TV show. ![]() When I ask Jake Elliott, Tamas Kemenczy, and Ben Babbitt-the three members of the studio-whether the rise of Trump has had any bearing on their determinedly political game, the response is bullish. Unsurprisingly, Cardboard Computer, the stateside developers behind Kentucky Route Zero, aren't in any mood to pull punches.
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