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Empire of Sin director on her inspiration, the game's historically-accurate newspapers, and the importance of diversity in characters

The game Brenda Romero has always wanted to make
by rawmeatcowboy
06 September 2019
GN Version 5.0

Brenda Romero has been waiting a long time to make Empire of Sin, and it's finally coming to fruition. The original source of inspiration for the title comes from all the way back in Romero's childhood, which she details in a Shacknews interview.

“the original inspiration goes back to my mom refusing to answer my question. I grew up in a town in northern New York, and it was on the Canadian border. So, there was a bar that was the oldest, continuously operating bar in the United States called The Place. And I wanted to know a simple question; how come they didn’t shut it down? And my mom didn’t want to say, ‘well you know, it’s a grey area, cops are dirty’. There’s not a chance she was going to tell me that. So, she didn’t answer the question and I became fascinated with the time period and I’ve had that fascination for 30 plus years.”

A ton of work is going into Empire of Sin to make it feel appropriate for 1920s Chicago. This goes for all aspects of the game, both big and small. Believe it or not, the dev team has one member who's job it is to recreate time-appropriate newspapers for the player to read. Romero explains the feature in an interview with USGamer.

"He researches what happened in this month in this year, and he writes newspapers. So if you go to the newsstand in a game and purchase a newspaper, depending on what time it is you're going to get that news."

Romero wants features like these to be included in the game in order to immerse the player. Another way to build that immersion is by letting the player feel like they're represented in-game. This is something Romero takes extremely seriously.

"[It's] unbelievably fucking important that you can play as a black boss; you can play as a black female boss. It was important to me that if you're Latino you can play as a Latino character, or if you're a Native American you can have a Native American character. So someplace, somehow you can see yourself in the game, no matter who you are."

[Link, Link]