Cancer Alley, Pixelated

An artful computer game inspired by the Louisiana town of Norco

by

It’s right there on the screen, in big, pixelated letters, stamped on top of an equally-pixelated South Louisiana skyline. A leviathan of gray pipes and tubes fill the foreground, a criss-cross of industrial machinery and grimy steel; behind it, the soft blues and pinks of the morning sky. At the center of it all glows an eternal flame, a soft pillar of fire billowing in the wind. A low mechanical hum permeates the air, a symphony of pumps chugging laboriously. A breeze pushes gulls across the horizon.

The portrait is the backdrop for the 2022 video game NORCO, but it depicts a real place:  “Cancer Alley,” an eighty-five-mile stretch of land on the Mississippi River that accounts for almost half of all oil and petrochemical production in the United States.

The point-and-click adventure game is the newest creation from independent game development team Geography of Robots. In NORCO, the player takes on the role of Kay, a brooding young runaway returning home for the first time after learning of her mother’s death. Through a series of narrative moments, conversations, and puzzles, players navigate a world becoming increasingly overtaken by technology and urban decay. The game is populated by a cast of odd characters: from stuffed animals to drug abusers, robots to cats, fortune tellers to cultists.

Set humbly on the banks of the Mississippi River twenty-five miles west of New Orleans, the town that the game is based upon—Norco, Louisiana—resembles most other small towns across the Gulf South. There’s a small, locally-run diner, a corner convenience store, orderly rows of quaint houses, and a snowcone stand. The air there is humid and heavy, sticking to the lungs like fly paper. Simmering waves of steam radiate off of worn-out asphalt roads, evidence of a recent hot summer rainstorm. Even outside of hurricane season, the stain of storms past is prevalent. Ditches run deep along roadsides. Fenceposts stand tilted in the ground, and bald spots of missing shingles on roofs shine like medals of valor. 

“It’s a small town,” said local schoolteacher Lori Lyons, one of Norco’s roughly three thousand citizens. “Everyone knows everybody and watches out for everybody.” Lyons has lived in Norco since 1994, in the very same house, which sits on Apple Street, one of the town’s main roads. She and her husband have leaned into the joke, adorning their front door with a bright red painted wooden apple. The theme continues through the interior; a red apple clock hangs on the wall in the kitchen, and below it on the countertops and table, red and green ceramic apples abound.

What distinguishes Norco, though, is its next-door neighbor, the looming giant just over the fence line: the Shell Oil-owned Norco Manufacturing Complex. On 366 acres of what was once Goodhope Plantation, the industrial jungle now processes ten million gallons of crude oil every day. Norco itself exists because of this complex; the town was originally built, in the early twentieth century, to house the workers and their families. “Norco” is just an acronym for “New Orleans Refining Company”. The oil plant looms over the town as a constant, inescapable noise. It sits on the horizon like something out of Blade Runner—only one of the over-150 plants and refineries along Louisiana’s industrial corridor. In Norco and its neighboring towns, residents are seven hundred times more likely to get cancer than people who live practically anywhere else. 

“The plant really doesn’t bother me much,” said Lyons, referring to the refinery. “Sometimes it’s noisy and smelly, but they really do a great job of giving back to the community. Our local elementary school is fantastic because of them.” Still, she shared that the threat of a potential accident looms in the back of her mind.

Accidents have happened before.

May 5, 1988, 3:37 am

Fire in the sky.

The explosion is heard in downtown New Orleans, twenty-five miles away.

Seven Shell Oil employees, killed in an instant.

Debris hurtling through the air, for miles.

Windows shatter in unison.

A two-year-old boy lies in bed still asleep, covered in broken glass.

In 2015, the boy covered in glass was now a man, going by the pseudonym “Yuts” in online gaming circles. By day, he worked for the City of New Orleans as a geographic information system developer. By night, he chronicled his world. Doodles, sketches, photographs, pixel art, stories—all documented on his Tumblr blog GeographyOfRobots. Eventually, all of it converged with Yuts’s interest in game development. What he had was a video game.

It started out as a simple side-scrolling platformer, where the player takes control of a humanoid robot named Million, who breaks into an oil plant. Over time, though, it evolved. Yuts, through his game, began to wonder about why the robot was there in the first place, where it came from, what its world was like, and the day-to-day struggles of the people in that place. 

“Making the game was a way of processing many feelings about the region,” said Yuts. “Living in Louisiana, there’s a lack of stability that colors everything. The game tries to express that experience and maybe come to terms with it.”

Even before Yuts officially released NORCO in the spring of 2022, it was being heralded as an indie hit. It won the Tribeca Film Festival’s first-ever Games Award, and was praised by the judges “for its potential for excellence in art and storytelling through design, artistic mastery, and highly immersive worlds.” 

The gaming industry is largely dominated by multi-million dollar development companies commonly known as “Triple-A” studios, which have massive budgets and staff. While the games they are able to create are polished and often visually stunning, they frequently lack character or cause beyond basic entertainment. Much of NORCO’s charm and beauty comes from its hand-made nature, the product of a passion project constructed by a small-scale team, who envisioned an experience that is more than just a video game. 

NORCO is not without its influences. It is easy to classify the game as “Southern Gothic” or “Cyberpunk,” but on the Geography of Robots website, Yuts describes his aesthetic most succinctly as “Petroleum Blues.” Although he cites Hideo Kojima’s 1988 game Snatcher as an inspiration for the gameplay, his inspirations aren’t solely digital. He also throws out names like Kafka, Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy as influences. Motifs like the inevitability of death, the pain of loss, the bonds of family, the greed of capitalism, and the zeal of religion all pepper the DNA of the game in a way that makes the digital mirror of Norco feel wholly complete, and lived in. The virtual town draws directly from Yuts’s experience growing up there. “Growing up Catholic in Norco, I always saw the imagery of my faith juxtaposed with the industrial landscape of the area.” He says. “The aesthetics of faith and the aesthetics of industry both left an impression on me from a young age.”

One of the most striking qualities of NORCO, though, is the fact that the game is truly gorgeous. Each pixelated background is handcrafted with intricate detail. The characters feel real and true to life, and the storyline is just fantastical enough to set it apart from reality, but still keep it grounded in human struggles. There are little moments within the game that speak to the authenticity of the characters. 

In one particular scene, Kay meets up with an old family friend, whom she must team up with in her investigation. The game presents the player with the friend’s home—a small blue house, windows boarded with plywood and flowery moss growing on the roof. In the skyline above, the cottage is dominated by glowing monolithic pillars of the nearby refinery. Inside the house, an old man with a gray beard sits in the dark. An oxygen tank behind him runs up into a tube under his nose. 

He is known simply as “Duck”. His house is the last in the neighborhood that hasn’t been bought out by the plant. All the neighbors are gone, their empty houses looted for copper and scrap metal.

Here, Yuts is considering the 2002 buyouts that occurred in response to the explosion he experienced as a child, in which Shell Community Relations reached an agreement with the Concerned Citizens of Norco, offering to either buy the property directly adjacent to the factory, or to provide a much smaller home-improvement plan, provided that the homeowners stay at least five years.

 At the end of a conversation, Duck, sitting in the darkness of his home, leaves the player with a haunting quote: “Money they were offering to buy us out was alright,” he says. “Be worth a lot more had they never come.” 

norcogame.com