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By Brad Cook “Three things inspired me,” explains Demis Hassabis, creator of Republic: The Revolution. “One was a fascinating book by the brilliant Nobel Prize winning author Elias Canetti called Crowds and Power, which explains human history in terms of mob power. |
“And last but not least were the real life events surrounding the fall of Gorbachev, the USSR, and the rise of Yeltsin in the early 1990s.”
Keeping Up With Current Events. Luckily, you can click on the main story to read the English translation.
With a basic direction in place, Hassabis and his staff at London-based developer Elixir Studios set about building a unique strategy game that comes to your Mac courtesy of publisher Feral Interactive. Republic the Revolution is set in the fictional Soviet province Novistrana, which broke away from the mother country after the fall of the USSR and came under the rule of President Karasov, a democratically elected leader who is really a despot at heart.
When your parents are abducted by Karasov’s secret police, you get a first-hand glimpse of the man’s evil nature and vow to get revenge no matter how long it takes. Your goals in Republic the Revolution are to convince others to join your cause, consolidate your power and repel attacks by rival factions, and ultimately unseat Karasov. Whether the Novistranians wind up better off under your rule is up to you.
![You should be able to play [Republic the Revolution] successfully whether you're a right-wing capitalist or a left-wing militant.](http://bradcook.net/games/articles/2004/02/republic/images/quote1.gif)
Justify the Means?
“I tried not to let my ideologies influence the way Republic played,” notes Hassabis. “The idea was that you should be able to play it successfully whether you’re a right-wing capitalist or a left-wing militant.
“You’re free to choose how moral or immoral you wish to be,” he adds. “As in real life, there are many shortcuts and temptations along the way encouraging you to engage in unethical methods. It comes back to that old adage, though: ‘Does the end justify the means?’”
Hassabis doesn’t mind sharing his favorite strategy for success, however: “I usually make sure I have some characters that have very powerful character-attacking actions. I then use them to weaken the characters belonging to other factions and make them leave. This is the most efficient way to erode an opposing faction’s power base.”
Cue the Media. Everything must be properly orchestrated if you want to win the propaganda war.
The Road to Demagoguery
Canetti’s book not only digs into the psychology of mobs but also how a single ruler can control huge numbers of people for good or ill. The core of Republic the Revolution’s gameplay is a teacher-student duality that underscores these ideas: Karasov is the master, the charismatic leader whose commanding presence keeps him in power; you are the understudy, the young disciple who must learn how to manipulate the mobs the same way Karasov does if you want to take his place.
The rub, of course, lies in your own motivations for seizing power, beyond simple revenge for your parents’ abductions. Instead of points that you can allocate how you want, the game opens with a ten-question personality test that decides where your strengths will lie.
“The stats system is quite complex,” says Hassabis, “so rather than assault you with loads of different values right at the start, we find out what kind of character you would want to be and do all the hard number crunching for you.”
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Those stats, which you can see and increase as you become more powerful, fire the engine that drives the game world, dictating which NPCs will work with you and which ones will try to undermine your efforts.
The characters who join your faction are just a few of the literally thousands of characters running around Novistrana. You start the game in a provincial city called Ekaterine and hold some political clout in just one of its districts, but it’s enough to get you started. You direct your character to engage in actions, such as recruiting new members or gaining knowledge of certain areas, and as new members join your faction you can direct them to undertake tasks too. To build power, you must keep your underlings happy while weakening other factions’ influence throughout the city.
![The most difficult part of [the research] was developing the cutting edge A.I. we needed to power the game. We required new, innovative techniques in order to realize the scale and detail of the cities we wanted to portray.](http://bradcook.net/games/articles/2004/02/republic/images/quote2.gif)
“We did a lot of sociological and psychological research to model the mass behavior of human society,” says Hassabis. “The most difficult part of that was developing the cutting edge A.I. we needed to power the game. We required new, innovative techniques, such as complex level-of-detail algorithms, in order to realize the scale and detail of the cities we wanted to portray.”
Life in Novistrana. Just another day in another city in another former Soviet republic struggling toward a
society of freedom.
Each character in the game is distinct, with a unique personality and a life that you can follow. You can watch that person go to work, interact with friends, and go about other day-to-day activities. You can also click on all kinds of objects — people, buildings, cars, statues, and more — and learn more about them, although you’ll want to direct your fellow faction members to gather knowledge if you want to dig up some real dirt.
Mind if I Park This Here? Life in a fascist country is
never easy.
Snoop Stepanov, Trickster
To unearth more about the game world, you may also want to look at the “official” Novistrana web site, where you can view the country’s vital stats, learn how to say a few things in the Novistranian language, and listen to one of President Karasov’s most famous speeches.
“Many people were tricked into thinking it was indeed a real country’s tourist board,” notes Hassabis. “It also seems that Novistrana’s Eurovision song contest entry, ‘A Spud to the Head,’ by Snoop Stepanov, fooled a whole host of people.”
If you liked this game, check out:
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