Ander Monson in conversation with Yuts, creator of NORCO
I first encountered NORCO last year teaching a course on narrative games. It’s a throwback-style point-and-click video game released in 2022 by Geography of Robots and set in a futuristic/mythologized version of the Gulf Coast. I was blown away by what I’d describe as the electricity I could feel arcing between the game world and the place itself. Though the plot is mostly fictional, the game felt somehow documentary.
NORCO takes its name from the real town of Norco, named for the New Orleans Refining Company, the industry that’s foundational to the town’s economy and part of its environmental ruin. I sensed that there was no way this game could be made by someone who didn’t love the place. It is weird, eerie, funny, sad, and ultimately quite beautiful; it moved me. It feels to me like a novel, an autobiographical one with important things to say on behalf of the place and the people who continue to make their lives there. I recognized something in the game that felt familiar and urgent: imaginary gardens but with real toads in them. It wasn’t surprising to learn that Yuts’s background is in geography.
This conversation took place in August and September, 2025. As we traded emails, NORCO announced a physical release as part of UK outfit Lost in Cult’s great new physical games series. Many smaller games and indie titles are never released physically (most people download them instead), but for those of us who want to be able to keep a reliable archive of a game and to hold it in our hands, physical releases are the way forward. I suppose it’s kind of like the vinyl resurgence. I ordered mine so fast I might have broken the Lost in Cult server. (Sorry my dudes.) Maybe you will want to get your copy before they’re sold out? It’s a limited edition, so get to it.
—Ander Monson
I. Game as Journal
Ander Monson (AM): I imagine most of our readers won’t know NORCO, your first game, so let’s start there. I understand the game, or maybe the impulse for the game, started as an attempt to put together a project about New Orleans post-Katrina: I’ve seen that described as a documentary, oral history, and experimental geography, about a place you knew well but that had undergone a tremendous change.
At some point this turned into a game that became NORCO. It’s set in a mythologized version of the real town Norco, which is evidently not a town proper but a census-designated place, I see on looking it up. The town in the game feels a little bit like a place that’s not a place, too, sinking inexorably into the swamp, under blankets of pollution and corporate control, and yet still filled with glimmers of hope, as you’ve described it, which are largely the people we meet in the game.
Playing it, it felt true, true to an emotional experience of growing up in the place rather than a documentary version of it. I think this is why I recognized it so clearly, as this was my experience with my first book, the novel Other Electricities, which takes place in Upper Michigan, and which was once prosperous enough with copper and iron ore mining to have seriously been considered as the potential state capital. The same potential capital city presently has a population of 621, and the ruins of mines and of the infrastructure for mining and processing copper and iron ore are everywhere. The mines have been gone since before I was born (though one reopened after I left when copper prices began rising again).
Growing up there felt like growing up in darkness. Literal darkness because the winters are so long and so dark, though I’m aware that some people who live there love the outdoors, cross-country skiing, etc. I loved it but I hated it too, and my experience was dark, so my book is dark. In that way it’s not about the literal place but a place that maybe exists only for me and my group of weirdo friends who grew up there. It felt like we grew up in the movements of a doom song, where we’re all subject to much larger forces that we have no control over, but we still have to try to find a way to live and love and have fun and make things and fuck shit up and maybe eventually get out or find a new relationship with the place.
And this is the feeling I get strongly from playing your game. It comes from a combination of the world you’ve built hand its relationship with the actual, documentary world, which I’d love to hear you talk about in whatever way seems fun to you.
Yuts (Y): Everything you’re describing about Upper Michigan and your way of conceptualizing Other Electricities is very relatable to me. When I was making NORCO, I was in a slightly different and maybe more morose headspace than I am now. The period between Katrina and Covid, when the game was being conceived and developed, was a generally dark and confusing time in our culture. There was a lot of that darkness (purely metaphorical in this case, though it was expressed in some of the color palettes, etc.) hanging over the game, even though Norco the place, the actual community, is much more eclectic. I go out of my way lately to emphasize that it’s by no means dystopian. Many people love and are proud of their community, including me. NORCO told a mostly disempowering, murky story, but it’s just one story, and you can tell a lot of stories about that place.
And the cultural confusion/chaos is still there, of course, but I feel a little more acclimated to it. I get the sense that many have developed an attitude of, basically, “Yes, the world feels more and more like a bizarre dream, but I can’t let it distract me forever.” That’s the general philosophy I’ve developed with our new project, Sulfur Coast. It’s set in 2015, the near past, rather than some abstract present or future. This was a practical decision, since the game touches on the effects of the 2014 oil glut in a fictional town, but I’m learning that it’s easier to focus on the past without the current mood or discourse overdetermining the result.
NORCO was also looking backwards, as you mention, but that was more a byproduct of its long development timeline than a conscious choice. Because it was spread over so many years, it became almost a journal, and had a more freeform result than I’m expecting in Sulfur Coast.
Your comment on writing Other Electricities for a small group of weirdo friends: I can absolutely relate to that. I had no expectation of NORCO ever having an audience beyond my small group of River Parish and New Orleans friends. But what I’ve learned is we weren’t so special after all. I’ve gotten a lot of messages from people who grew up in Norco or elsewhere in the region relating to the themes, aesthetics, tone, dialogue, etc. There are certain experiences of a place that don’t get expressed because it would be too complicated to bother, or maybe in some cases, people consider the experience sacred. But in any case, I’m very happy to learn that I’m not alone in my sometimes complicated appreciation of my home.
II. Autobiographical Heat
AM: I can see how people read the game as dystopian, and have seen you pushing back against that description in interviews. Ultimately to me NORCO feels like an act of love toward the place and the community. Sure, it may be dark, but the focus is on the people making lives there. It reminds me of the film director Guy Maddin’s movie (and the accompanying book) My Winnipeg, which offers us a fictionalized double of the geographical place, similar but way weirder, overlaid with his fraught but fond relationship to it, which is obviously a subjective one.
Maybe this is where it connects a bit with its documentary origins. Were there people you interviewed before you knew it was a game who informed some of the characters we meet? I’m thinking of how when we first encounter LeBlanc, he seems like a character we may not immediately be interested in talking to, but he ends up becoming one of the most complex and compelling characters. I watched your Knowlton talk in which you show a video narrated by Donald Tregre about his experiences in the (actual) place. Some of the shots in that video definitely have the feel of the finished game, like the color palette or the way the light looks.
I’d like to lean into your comment about how the game became almost a journal. Part of my interest in smaller games like NORCO is how clearly I can feel the author (or the authors) in a smaller game. Or maybe what I mean is that I can feel the personal in the fictional. It’s not like I need games to be autobiographical exactly; that would be boring. But I do find it powerful when there’s some kind of autobiographical heat to them, not something that got written by committee. So your talking about how the game became kind of like a journal reminded me of how a lot of writers I know think about whatever book they’re working on. You’re usually working on one of these for a long time, and the book is often a record of what was happening in the writer’s life during that time, what they were reading and thinking and imagining.
Y: I like the phrase “autobiographical heat.” In both of the cases you describe——the pre-game documentarian work, and the quasi-journal quality of the game——the techniques are mainly put toward trying to capture the essence of a place, so in that regard the metaphorical “journal” would be almost like a field journal. I was doing a lot of landscape sketches that then became environments in the game. There are ways in which it served as a personal journal as well, but aside from shared experiences like home flooding, and a few winks to family and friends, the direct autobiographical elements were obscured, buried, or otherwise transformed. But that kind of process does still leave behind the imprint you’re describing. I’m not similar to Kay in most respects, and she’s not based on any single individual nor is she a composite of individuals from my life, but I wrote her from a place of familiarity. The characters were mainly written as people I could have brushed shoulders with but never did.
You mention that many fictional books by authors you know often double as journals even if it’s not explicit. It’s something I think about a lot, and am always curious what other people’s processes look like when making these kinds of works. I do live and breathe these games while I’m working on them, out of pure necessity if nothing else, because of the time commitment involved like you say. Most of my reading and research, most of my thoughts, and a majority of my nights and weekends, are in service of the project. I would imagine this is true for many people who undertake a creative pursuit of a certain scope. I recently cracked Libra by Don DeLillo because I wanted to see how he depicts New Orleans. I’m about a hundred pages in, and at this point am just a bit awed. There is such a remarkable density of detail hung very intentionally, with so much of the “heat” of history radiating off it. If I imagine myself undertaking a project of that scope, it would by necessity require my life to become almost synonymous with the work. You commit to something, and you just become the incubator for the work. So in that way, a work can also be a journal of your life because it’s literally all you do, it’s all you think about.
III: Shared-Access Worlds AM: I feel like when I am working on a big project (most obviously, my book Predator, which took much longer than my other books because I really didn’t know what I was doing for a long time making it and I was resisting some obvious things, like just the usefulness of a simple narrative hook), a big part of me is in that world, whatever the rest of my life is like at the time. It’s a beautiful pleasure to be so absorbed, but it also has a cost on the rest of my life, marriage, parenting, day job, etc. I don’t think the cost is too much to bear, but I think about that sometimes, like when a close friend of mine died a couple years ago from an aggressive and essentially untreatable brain cancer: how much of her life was in her work. Most artists spend a lot of time in their own worlds. These worlds are sometimes inaccessible to our family and friends, and there’s an economic cost (and a kind of sadness) that these worlds are so engrossing and then they disappear, except for whatever finished work comes out of them. One thing I’m wondering: since almost all games of any scope (though shoutout to the solo indie developers of the world who really do it all themselves, which kinda blows my mind) are collaborative, how much of that world can be shared? Some writing is collaborative too, obviously, like it comes out of a community or a friendship or a marriage or a long time living in a place, and I don’t want to discount the work that editors do on books, but games do seem different to me. Is that your experience? My sense is that Geography of Robots, while you’re at the heart of it, comes out of a group and a scene, and that you have excellent collaborators. How much of that private world is shared on account of splitting up the technical tasks or the mix of ideas and ambitions all going into the collective work? Does it feel somehow rhizomal or distributed? Does it maybe have a little longer shelf life as a result because it’s a shared-access world, at least in part? I’m hoping so. Probably there’s a limit to how many people you can have involved and have it still feel hot and weird and lived-in in that way. Like how many people can you have involved before it becomes too much an act of commerce and not an act of love or an act of art? Or how do you keep the act of love/art as you necessarily have to interact with a larger team to make a bigger or more complex game so that the player (reader) can still feel that pulse?
Y: I’m very sorry to hear about your friend. I can only imagine the sense of loss when someone close to you with that type of vast interior life passes. I’m glad to hear she at least left some of her work behind. I’ve been fortunate so far with the creative/collaborative side of my friend group. It’s something that crosses my mind though, how singular a lot of them are. And as you might expect they’re not aware of it, and not generally concerned with preserving those parts of themselves in any way, so a lot of it will just go with them. There are entire scenes and subcultures that I’ve seen pass that way. It was elating, interesting, full of unique and fascinating people, and then it dries up, the people involved get older, etc. Without getting too wistful about it, I do think that’s a big reason work that centers on geography is appealing to me. I want to preserve a little of that spirit somewhere so the things I found important about a place and time aren’t lost, because they often model ways of thinking and living that you may want to access or emulate later on. Norco had a little of the post-K New Orleans experience in it. In retrospect, I wish I’d included more. Not the bleak aspects, but the energy and strangeness and subcultural elements that grew out of it.
Regarding collaboration and how Geography of Robots operates as a studio, the process is always changing, but the general character of it is that I do what I can to keep some momentum going, and then once I lock into something that feels right, I get others involved. At that point, the creative process becomes more horizontal. In the beginning, it mostly involved people with some connection to Louisiana, but that’s changed in the past several years. Jesse Jacobi was the first person involved who had no relationship at all to New Orleans, but he had no trouble visualizing and understanding the project. I think part of it was that there are common features between the Detroit area, where he lives, and here. But also, he’s a perceptive and bookish guy, we have similar media reference points, and a lot of shared sensibilities otherwise.
Since Geography of Robots started as a solo experiment, it can feel uncomfortable ceding control in certain areas. But in every case, the collaborators on the project either started as close friends or are remarkably well aligned and have such unmistakable talent that the best I can do is step aside. Julian Palacios, the Italian artist and developer, reached out in my DMs to get involved in the new game. I’ve loved his game Promesa since I played it in 2020. I had the opportunity to meet him, and it was another case of very complementary overlap as well as complementary divergence. He’s an incredibly talented Visual Effects developer. I have no capacity to do what he does. Both I and Geography of Robots as a studio have been blessed in this way. These talented people enter its orbit, often at just the right times. And I think it’s like you suggested—this is something that you can cultivate much more easily with a small crew. It’s easier to come up with a shared aesthetic language and to allow room for a little bit of serendipity. Essentially, the project provides a series of themes and motifs, and we all work to interpret and uphold them in our own way.
I share your admiration for solo devs, though in some cases I think the term may be a misnomer. Not in all cases of course, but some benefit from the work of contributors / collaborators /commissioned developers while minimizing that aspect. I think you’re right that having a larger group of developers can make the world you’re creating more robust; it wouldn’t necessarily stall out completely if I dropped dead. Some devs also achieve that by building a public-facing community, but steering and moderating that is a job in and of itself. Having a small group of friends and collaborators in a small private Discord is the happy medium, and much of what Geography of Robots has become has evolved out of that approach. And so to answer the question directly, there may be something like a rhizomatic quality to the studio, at least sometimes. It’s definitely very fluid and often changes shape, sometimes more vertical, sometimes more distributed.
AM: Yuts, thank you for this conversation and for Norco and all the work you’re doing in the world.
Screenshots courtesy of Geography of Robots
Ander Monson is the author of nine books, most recently Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession. His next book will be about video games.
Yuts is the founding member of the development studio Geography of Robots. The studio’s next release, tentatively named Sulfur Coast, is a mystery adventure that explores the industrial history of coastal Louisiana.