The story behind "Underground Milan"

The very first iteration of Undeground Milan, the subterranean city where REC/REW takes place, could be traced back as far as the late 2000s.

At that time I had been playing a rather dissatisfying game - I don't remember the name, and I don't think it really matters. The main menu had this odd image of a partially flooded Earth, with the Po valley nearly completely underwater. Nothing particulary fancy, and the graphics... well, let's just say they were nothing exceptional for the time, yet they had an eerily enticing nuance. In a matter of days, that dystopian scenery turned into the idea of Milan as a coastal city. A Venice-like place where the Navigli - including the internal circle that was (unwittingly, if you want my opinion!) buried in the Roaring Twenties - had been dug back to their former glory, creating busy waterways filled with small boats, ferries and barges.

A bright and mostly positive setting for a visual novel that was VERY slowly starting to develop inside my mind.

I know neither why nor how the subsequent iteration of that concept came to life. I do remember it all started in a mIRC chatroom I shared with a bunch of weirdos (they could say the same about me of course) who were telling me about their odd project - a manga inspired to H.P. Lovecraft and drawn in the style of Naoko Takeuchi. I was somewhat dissatisfied with the stricking contrast between the "happy" Milan-by-the-sea I had imagined and the much bleaker plot I had began to write down. In a matter of minutes, the bright coast city with white sand beaches and luxury hotels became a dirty, run-down underground settlement. A vault protecting its inhabitants from the climate collapse that had turned the surface into a sizzling hot, uninhabitable desert (something that survived the ruminations that followed, apparently).

To make things even worse, I turned the present-day Milan subway into a sort of hellish refugee camp inhabited by immigrants fleeing from Africa and the Middle East. A lawless place where people lived a miserable existence digging through garbage (which in a mockery of a landfill were brought upwards, rather than buried further down) in search of food and supplies.

That iteration also was my very first experience with Ren'Py. I think the version I used back then was between 6.8.something and 6.9.something else.

The result however was deemed too bleak (even for me!). In addition, I sincerely felt that a racism-filled scenario would be way too difficult for somebody like me to manage. Finally, the people I was (tentatively) working with ended up taking different routes, and the project was mothballed and left in a remote and nearly forgotten part of my brain, abandoned to itself.

That was the situation a few months ago, when a final iteration of Underground Milan, the one you may find in REC/REW, was born. I'm quite happy with  the final result: I think there's an eerie sense of alienation in the the mock-normality of a city which preserved most of its landmarks in the face of being turned into an underground ant nest.

In hindsight that's exactly the kind of feeling I was looking for back when (nearly 15 years ago) the idea that would become REC/REW's Underground Milan began its 15-year-or-so gestation...