The Complicated Emotions of an Industrial Game in a Post Industrial City

There’s an old chimney near where I went to nursery. I used to see it out of the car window when my parents drove me there, and I still sometimes see it now as I navigate the city myself a quarter of a century later. It’s not a normal chimney, not a small rooftop pillar to let out the smoke from a family home. This is an industrial chimney, a cylindrical monolith that reaches high above the surrounding buildings. It’s been on my horizon for most of my life, but I’ve never once seen smoke rise from it.

Newcastle upon Tyne is a city in North East England with a long history. One neighborhood is named Wallsend after Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman fortification built in A.D. 112 to keep out the Celts. The city itself is unambiguously named after its castle, now little more than a squat stone house, which was constructed under the command of William the Conqueror after he seized the English throne in 1066. But it was industry, not conflict, that defined Newcastle. By the end of the First Industrial Revolution the city was thriving, with inventors and workers flocking in and exports pouring out. In the 1930s, a local group of miners known as the Pitmen Painters began painting their lives, the work highlighting the ties between the industry of the region and the people. The entire region was considered a high priority target by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz because of the city’s shipbuilding and engineering work, but the factories continued to produce during Britain’s darkest hour and continued after the war ended. The cultural identity of Newcastle and the north developed around this engineering, factory, and shipbuilding work that made up the city’s economic center. 

But what bombs couldn’t break, Margaret Thatcher could. As a Conservative prime minister of Britain, Thatcher spent a good part of her political career decimating the north and the industrial sector. Her policies inflicted an unemployment crisis in the northern regions as she began radically reindustrializing the area without any protection for the workers or their families. She famously called the mostly northern miners “the enemies within” for organizing a strike against her plans to close the collieries, and took an infamous “walk in the wilderness” where she strolled through the urban decay she let fester in the north. Today, the remaining factories stand as empty as the castle keep and Roman walls.

Where Newcastle has seen greenery poke through the concrete wastelands of its once proud industry, 2019’s Satisfactory offers the opposite. It is a game about building an increasingly complex production line on an alien planet. Starting with relatively simple components made of raw materials, the new factory will evolve and expand, creating more and more intricate products from ever growing production lines. But while it is indeed satisfying to see your machine produce, mangle, and rearrange raw ingredients into sophisticated objects without any additional effort, it’s also inherently unethical in today’s landscape. Your structures don’t just grow, they metastasize, spreading across fields and valleys, demanding more and more resources from the once pristine, untouched landscape. The goal of this rampant industrialization isn’t noble – your factory dominates and pollutes the land for nothing more than the relentless pursuit of profit margins.

This game exists in a time where young activists are demanding the world establish a Green Industrial Revolution to counter the centuries of damage done since the last one. This demand for radical, international deindustrialization is not purely about the climate, as factories and labor have once again become synonymous with the wealth disparity and systemic inequality. Satisfactory appears to ask the player to side with the industrialists, but the game knows that your thoughts might contradict the game’s themes and openly teases you about it. The inhumane instructions as your factory grows are littered with sly references to the corporate overlords and their disinterest in the player’s romantic views on nature and humanity. When you get injured in Satisfactory, it doesn’t warn you that you are hurt, it warns you against damaging company property. Satisfactory wants you to know that what you are doing isn’t for the betterment of the planet, or the continuation of humanity, but to help futility line the pockets of the already incredibly.

But this allows the player to enjoy the game. Thanks to the self-awareness behind the mechanics and the knowing wink in the game’s limited dialogue, you can take on the role of a peon to the vast corporate empire without having to question whether the game is trying to promote the notion of late-stage capitalism. It becomes a work of satire that still lets you enjoy all the satisfaction of building the machine without the burden of ignoring its cost. As your factory grows hungrier, you’ll develop coal-guzzling power plants to keep the conveyor belts and machines running smoothly. These plants are huge, with towering smokestacks that reach into the blue sky as they pump out thick black clouds. Satisfactory allows you to look over your manmade horizon, filled with chimneys stacks and roaring factories knowing it is wrong, but feeling absolved of your role in creating it. 

But for some of us, the feeling is a lot more complicated.

Northern England has never fully recovered from deindustrialization. Pit villages that were built around local mines are still left destitute and disenfranchised by damage done 40 years ago. Newcastle limped on, but for a long time existed amongst the ruins of a greater version of itself, a former unattainable glory. These factories and shipyards were the economic and cultural foundation of the city, and when they closed with nothing to replace them, northern culture changed. It might have survived Thatcher’s work, but the North East is now one of the poorest regions of England, with a lower life expectancy and government support than the rest of the country. Instead of workers pride, there is now a pervasive grief and impotent rage at its untimely passing, one that might not be noticed by passersby but is felt in one way or another by everyone who was raised here.

When Margaret Thatcher died in 2013, the south mourned while the north held street parties. Perhaps not the most tactful thing to do, but since the Miners’ Strike and attempts to keep the factories open failed, the north has felt powerless against the whims of the south, so seeing the evitable befall a near-mythic villain was a cause for celebration. A decade of austerity by her heirs has seen the north once again targeted by the government more than anywhere else in England, further crystallizing the anger, loss, and yearning to return to a time where the region felt in control over its future. 

So after I returned from an alien forest to see a set of smokestacks cresting the digital horizon, there was a moment of unambiguous pride. Pride not at my virtual achievements, nor at the knowledge that my stores would be overflowing with valuable components, but pride that this factory was running at all. For the briefest moment all the game’s teasing couldn’t reach me and the guilt dissipated much like smoke in the air. Most of the industry around Newcastle, around me, closed in the ’80s before I was born, the deserted industrial estates now standing as monuments to everything the city had endured and lost. But here in Satisfactory, I could imagine they were still alive. The game gave me a glimpse into the world where they still worked: a world of movement and noise and smoke. In short it was the realization of a lifelong, collective dream. 

The reason that industry was so closely tied to northern culture was because it was once such a prominent part of life here. It was the economy, the social structure, the horizon. Seeing that industrial landscape emulated in Satisfactory let me imagine all of that coming back to the region. It wasn’t a perfect visualization, of course. Satisfactory doesn’t simulate the hundreds of engineers and workers that it took to run a factory decades ago, as only a maximum of four people work the same, almost entirely autonomous factory at once. But an operating factory appears as visual and cultural shorthand for a thriving community. Old photos of Newcastle, the work of the Pitman Painters, and even artists from other industrial areas, such as Aaron Harry Gorson, remind us of our industrial heritage and feed into the sense of loss at the lifeless buildings we live amongst.

Which is why Satisfactory is one of the first games to really capture that paradoxical northern industrial appreciation. It is far from the first game to ever depict factories before, with industrial wastelands depicted as far back as Sonic the Hedgehog’s Scrap Brain level in 1991, but it’s one of the first games to even jokingly delve into the complicated feelings post-industrial cities have around industry. These great sprawling factories weren’t built by the villain as they eroded the natural world for their evil schemes. They were built by you. Satisfactory lets you, albeit ironically, enjoy the sights and sounds of the factory and be proud of the work you’ve created.

But that pride wasn’t completely welcome for me. While seeing these factories might have momentarily dispelled my cultural grief, they did not cure it, and like in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, sometimes dead is better. 

People who grew up in the north or any other post-industrial landscape have to face the contradiction that Satisfactory so deftly avoided: a desire to see industry return and the knowledge of the damage it would do. Our heritage is in the factories and mines whose bodies still scatter the region, and we’ve spent decades mythologizing the industrial work done in the region. The desire to bring it back comes from wanting to fix the perceived wrong of their untimely death, but actually returning to that lifestyle is impossible and foolish. Regional pride isn’t worth the cost of worsening the climate emergency, and however much it stings, the sprawling, polluting, beautiful factories of Satisfactory should stay entirely behind the screen.