Enough Shop Talk: Seattle Day 4: Underground

There’s more to a game developer’s life than making games, playing them and then writing your asinine thoughts about them on your website blog. Sometimes you have to just get away and enjoy life. Sometimes you have to find the shit you love and do it. I love photography and food, and a trip to a new city taking photos and hitting restaurants sounded like something up my alley. I like to eat, drink and take photos, none of which has anything to do with games.

(The following is written from memory and is, more than likely, completely inaccurate and should not be taken as truth)

The ground broke away from the clump of trees and fell into the muck just before the Sound. Twice a day the mud and leaves would heave with the changing tide. The place was desolate, barren and unoccupied.

Arthur Denny arrived to this forested northwestern coast and in their infinite wisdom decided that yes, heaving muck, drastic tides and a hill that was so steep that sometimes it was unclimbable would be the perfect place to set up a city.
And so Duwamp was born.
Doc Maynard arrived and with his knowledge of the power of marketing shunned the choice of town name.
And so the city of Si’ahl was born.
Settlers came and set up businesses, people used Si’ahl as a gateway to Canada to possible gold claims up in the Yukon. But their European bred tongues had problems with the name of the city they passed through. And so fearful of the repurcussions of being referred to That Place You Go to Get Shit for the Yukon, they began referring to themselves as the anglicized name Seattle.

Seattle’s business district sat in a pool of muck and mud and shit. This was not only because of the times, an era before paving existed, but because twice a day the tides, and the poorly planned sewage mains, would flood the district.  The advent of the modern toilet did not solve the sewage issues, instead they forced the sewage back up to their source, making  it lethal to use the Crapper at two certain times of the day.
But nevertheless the town was booming: not only was the local sawmill making a mint from San Francisco’s repeated attempts at destroying itself, but Seattle’s business owners took advantage of doe-eyed eager rookie prospectors on their way north and marked up prices accordingly. The richer of folk, and this included the ever increasing business owners, made homes at the top of the hill. Life was good. Seattle was booming.

And then some clumsy twat dropped a brick of grease on the stove and burnt the whole thing down.

The whole town razed wasn’t enough to keep the Seattle people down: nobody had died so spirits were up. and in an effort to thwart the issues of sewage, mud and tides, they decided to build on top of the existing remains. They raked earth from the hill, decreasing the grade and increased the ground level. “Build the buildings higher! We’ll build walls to raise the sidewalks!” cried the city planners. And they did. But because nobody thought that perhaps coming up with a common number was a good idea, the sidewalks were built higher than the first floor of businesses.

Ladders to climb these great walls didn’t work  for businesses. Death by falling storage barrels took customers at a rate of 25 per year. And so the local city planners and businesses agreed that they would move their first floors up a story and the city would reflect that with their road planning. Everything below this first floor was piled over with bricks, dirt and cement.

And thus the Underground was born.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.