Question as in topic title.

Does Weisman or Dowd or someone from SR1 writing stuff admited, why they chose Seattle as starting city? Why not Chicago (FASA was placed there), why not NY or something Deus Ex Machine style, like Night City (cyberpunk v.1 was in the market before SR1), or Neo Tokyo?

Thanks in advance

I have no evidence of this, but my theory would be that Seattle is a very working class, blue collar port city and most Asian imports go there before anywhere else, So in theory that would make Seattle a very important city in the trade market, and if the US lost control of California, Seattle would be the most important link with Asia and would therefore be a hub for all import/export and trade comodities, with Importance comes Corporate Headquarters, With corp headquarters comes lots of people, and with lots of people comes uncontrollable crime.

it probably seemd like the most interesting city when they finished drafting the world

a) choosing Seattle was prescient in a way, given the high cultural profile it got during the 90s

b) I'm not sure the Native American business would have made as much sense anywhere else (at least the cities you mention). It's not such a big thing now, but the Native American element used to be HUGE. It was at LEAST as important in the 1st ed. books, I think, as IEs and other ED tie-ins.

And MY Question has been: Why focus on a single city at all? Why a Seattle? Why a 'Night City'? What is it about cyberpunk styled futures screams :Single City: at people?

I've read the books, most, if not all of them tend to have world travel (and beyond!) ingrained in them, so why do so many games feel the need to be so geographically restricted?

I mean: Neuromancer starts in Tokyo, moves to Turkey, among others, and ends in Space!

And that's just the one book, arguably the granddaddy/bible...


Bah.

Had to choose somewhere.

Cyberpunk 2013 is 1989, SR1 1990, Cyebrpunk 2020 is 1991, Night City is a Cyberpunk 2020 so the city setting is actually released after SR1. If you check the publication dates Night City was released after SR1.

I imagine that Seattle was chosen for it's location and cultural breakdown [port, Indian land, etc].

As for why base it in a city at all..
..Otherwise people flounder badly when it comes to imagine places, peoples, setting, etc without some sort of help.


Most cyberpunk fiction, written before SR and CP2020 arrived on the scene are local - no globetrotting, because they mostly revolved around street-level stories and people who very often didn't have much in the way of 'ware..
..Because that was the essence of the cyberpunk movement and the stories, 'ordinary' people struggling in a speeded-up world.


Games like SR or CP2020 don't really reflect cyberpunk, anymore - they now seem to be trying to be action movies like Mission Impossible or Hard Boiled or SWAT, etc.

I don't know, Snow crash and Hardwired (both seminal works) were definitely closer to SR and CP2020 than the average joe cyber concept.

Also, I think Seattle was chosen because it's "chic"'ness was firmly established by the late 80's. Ie. They chose it because it was considered "cool", unlike say Montogomery or Hoboken.


-NativeRigger

heh, Snow Crash was actually sort of anti-seminal; it came at or after the peak of cyberpunk fiction, and was intended at least partly to be a satire of cyberpunk. Snow Crash is anti-seminic, you heard it here first!

I namecheck Neuromancer (with a good 6 years? on CP and SR) and he tries to tell me that 'prior to...' that all these were 'local street stories'?

I mean, Gibson's later works (virtual light and all) were local streetish stories, but they postdate Shadowrun...
and even they included trips to Japan and the like (Idoru...).

1st ed. SR came out in '89 (btw). It was writen, I am sure, a year earlier. Seattle was just becoming the new city, almost like an emerging AAA. The population there was booming (500k to over a million in 8 years) and everyone was talking about it. It probably made sense to put it in a New Large city that many people had heard of but not everyone had been to. The settings of LA and New York were done to death... and really who gets excited about Chicago?

As for "Neo Tokyo" or other such made up cities, I think the creators wanted to keep SR grounded firmly im reality. They took great pains to lift our future past from things that could happen. The whole game is based on a real life calendar.

Because when you look at D&D, the world is so... Well, there's no timeline or set universe. So you have to start somewhere to make a tangible world like Shadowrun. Seattle seems to be a good starting place. Modern, a port city, and as was mentioned should continue to be large and important in the future.

Why?
Because Seattle kicks ass, that's why.
Maybe I'm biased, though.

On some level it DOES disturb me that I moved here because of Shadowrun. Or rather, I visited because of shadowrun, and decided to move after that.

Jim Butcher

So, no-one get "official" statement from SR1 book authors about "how the Shadowrun universe emerged"?
I was afraid that this idea was discussed, and topic long dead & closed on jive.dumpshock old forum.

I expected that somebody (Bull, or Rob, or maybe Ancient/Gurth) knew something from FASA developers.

So, no-one ever try to interview eg. Weisman or Dowd and ask him "How you get THIS particular idea? Seattle, dragon-media celebrity" etc.?

If my English was better I would do that by myself. It's good moment - after FPS failure, Weisman working with this SR again (interview=keeping "hype" about brand), and Nigel Findley example ( :cry: ) shows, that we can't wait forever

The rain.

Acid rain is always fun. And Mattness, looks like you're English is coming along quite well already.

Considering that I live near Chicago, I have to say that it is nothing to get excited about.

However, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novels (and the TV show) were absolutely amazing.

On the other hand the fact that the SR guys got to tell fasa that they nuked them must of been great fun

One of the reasons put forward that I heard was that they chose Seattle because it was relatively unknown to people and hadn't really been used much by anyone. And then along came Nirvana and grunge. Whoops.

Shadow asks "and really who gets excited about Chicago?"

Insect spirits... then, after the abundance of corpses, Shedim.

I think yu can look at it as a combination of factors. First, as has been pointed out, Seattle wasn't used by much and really, no-one had heard much about it at the time. Second is that what is around it wuld be perfect for setting up things like Council Island, etc, and the NAN around it to the north(and the Tir to the South). Another reason is because they COULD put the Tir to the south, because there are a number f places associated with certain grups of New Agers as places of power there(Crater Lake) and up around Seattle(Mt. Shasta). Made a good place, really.

I agree, I'm stumped. If I were looking for a grungy, cyberpunk, dystopian city, Seattle is just about the LAST place I would look. But then again, maybe things were different pre-Starbuck's.

You have to look at all the factors. Near enough to the mountains, but on the coast for shipping. Close to the NAN lands and the Tir, but isolated enough from the central UCAS to be almost a free city. It's location alone opens up many different gaming scenarios that might be harder to fit in, or more contrived in other places in the Sixth World.

The NAN and UCAS are made up places. If they had decided instead to go for NYC, Louisiana or Baltimore, they could have put the NAN (or some similarly ridiculous group) and the Tir right next door again and come up with their own history and justification for such.

Not really. Most of the eastern tribes have long since departed through one means or another. The west coast was more reasonable for a location, especially when factoring in the other geographical features, as well as a strong Asian presence and influence.

Prior to the dot com boom, yes, Seattle was very different. It was primarily a shipping and industrial town - and the industry was stuff like metals, chemicals, and Boeing. 's why it used to be called the "Jet City" until the city council decided to revamp the city's image and call it the "Emerald City."

Not that I know ANYBODY who calls it that...

No, I agree, it would be a bit of a stretch for the Native Americans to decide to move into West Virginia. However, it would also be a bit of a stretch for the Native American population to increase exponentially in less than a generation and reclaim the vast majority of the Midwest too, so I don't see much of a problem there. However, if we're looking for a conflict of races, of political ideas, of nations, I see the Virginia/Maryland, UCAS/CAS split as being a bit more based in reality than a bunch of injuns multiplying their numbers by a factor of 100 and becoming a genuine political force.

And of course, elves popping up and setting themselves up as an independent nation could be done just about anywhere you can accept elves popping up.

Virginia/Maryland doesn't have the same 'volcanic' locale, or the Asian influence, or access to the West coast, or a single isolated city that could work as a 'shadowrunner hub', etc.

If you're talking about a literal volcano, you're right, no volcanoes there. However, except as an excuse to cover Puyallup with ash, the volcano really is pretty irrelevant. You could just as easily replace it with an earthquake in LA, or a nuclear explosion near Baltimore (from a nuclear plant, not necessarily a bomb, but basically a nuclear explosion anywhere NW of Maryland will, due to crosswinds, contaminate parts or all of the state. Or a bomb of sufficient size could hit anywhere.

If you're talking about the locals or the political climate... Are you talking about the same Seattle I am? Come on, Seattle is like the most preppy city in the world. Alright, it was a little less so back in 1989, but it can't have changed that much. I mean World's Fair, Goodwill Games and beautiful, unspoiled wilderness. Such angst! Such conflict between man and industry!



Maryland does have a strong Asian influence, although perhaps not as much as Seattle. You could grab anywhere in California if you wanted Asian influence without going with yuppy city. Or, this being a science fiction game where, due to changes in the economy, more Asians move into an area which already is an established epicenter of industrial growth. And unlike Seattle (boasting 70% white in 2006, certainly more in 1989), Baltimore is 60% black, meaning the full number of minorities is well in excess of Seattle's number of minorities (whether you consider blacks the minority or the majority in this case). NYC is the first city to reach 100,000 people, Baltimore is the second. Seattle is a fifth the size of LA (and smaller than DC, Baltimore, New Orleans or just about any other city that would be reasonably considered) and has tons of farm land around, which is very NOT cyberpunk.



Since when was the West coast required for cyberpunk? Anyway, if you MUST have west coast, move it to LA. A place with real problems.



Seattle isn't really isolated except if you write the fiction so that it's surrounded by foreign countries. DC nearly was in a foreign country during the Civil War. LA and Miami feel like they're foreign countries. In the current Shadowrun game world, LA is in a foreign country. DC is nearly in a foreign country. Seattle is only in a foreign country because of the most incredible stretch of logic. I'm pretty sure that Baltimore, New Orleans and LA all way outweigh Seattle as seaports, not to mention political importance too.

We can argue all day about it, but that wasn't my point. I am not debating that other places contain some of the factors that make Seattle unique in the Sixth World, as again that would be pointless. My point is that is is the combination of factors that enabled Seattle to be the prime choice as a flagship city for which the writers to base their game around. It was the one city that contained everything they needed in close proximity, and they built from there.

Bah, I still disagree. From my point of view, Seattle has almost NOTHING that makes it either dystopian nor cyberpunk, except for rain and Asians (both of which also appear elsewhere). It has a lot of factors which make it distinctly NOT cyberpunk, however.

Thanks, Fortune. That's EXACTLY, what I want to know. That's what I should post, when starting this threat.
So, fellow dumpshockers, maybe we will focus on this subject



It's not so obvious, IMHO. When CFS sourcebook appeared I even wonder that FASA will move "starting city" from Sea-Tac to SanFran-Orcland (strong tensions, clear factions: japanacorps vs. metas), or LA (El Infierno description was totally awesome basis for street-level settings). In "And so it came to pass" chapter was so many other big events equal, or IMHO more important, than volcanos eruption that I don't buy such argument (until some author don't verify that as truth).

- Some1 mensions, that "volcanic" bacground was deciding factor. But NY was part-sinked, and LA problems with eartquakes are widelly know.
- some1 other suggest that "city surrounded by indians" factor best fit to Seattle. I'm outsider, so US geopolitics in 1980s isn't my special skill that i put in my resume, but why Seattle region? It was so well known for native americans communities, that Chicago-based publishing company chose in this location? As previous posters pointed out earlier - it could happen anywhere (Portland case).

Still it's just our assumption.
Still no one, who knows something from source (Shadowrun first edition authors)?

At the time that they chose to base the game in Seattle, it was a large city with little attention paid to it on the world stage. We know about it now because of movements (grunge, corporate coffee) that came out of it after SR1 was published. So it was a bit of a blank slate, which is unusual in a large city.

It had a lot of elements to it that were very ripe for the SR setting, though. It was a port city which maintained a lot of Asian contact. That was unusual in the US. It had a strong contemporary Native American influence in the region, which was also unusual for a large city. It had an odd mix of blue collar dock town (good for fitting in a crime element) and corporate interests because of it's link to Asia and importing, as well as Boeing being based there.

It was also a border town, with a bit of a border feel that could be developed by the writers. Possibly most importantly, though, was the blank slate feel that I mentioned earlier. If I say "New York" to you, you conjure a lot of images in your head, even if you've never been there. Seattle didn't have that, other than maybe images of rain. So it could be whatever the writers wanted it to be without a lot of baggage.

As for why not a fantasy city, SR needed to be grounded in a real city, I believe, in order to ground the fantasy elements in our world. Putting it in a made up world would have left the fantasy elements to carry the whole thing off into lala land. It needed a bit of reality to bring it home that a fantasy city couldn't provide.

To address a last point, that being why Neuromancer's globe hopping wouldn't work equally well for SR, it comes down to the fact that Neuromancer is one relatively short story while SR invites the players to sit down and tell many with the same characters. Notice that Count Zero, the sequel to Neuromancer, settles down a bit. In storytelling you eventually have to provide a setting against which events can unfold or your action seems to be little more than airline flights.

Twin Peaks is the reason!