But to fast-forward a bit, I didn’t really become intimately familiar with the river parishes until I did a book on it, Vestiges of Grandeur, which was basically devoted to the late 18th and early 19th century agrarian sites. So that was quite an interesting initial foray into the world of Norco.
#Norco la windows
RICHARD: The folks whose house we were going to had to move because all the windows had gotten blown out. Because all that you see is this looming metropolis past the swamp that is just a bunch of petrochemical and oil refining, and there’d also just been an explosion out there. That was my first experience, and I was like, Wow, I cannot believe that anybody lives here. We had a krewe meeting in a place I had never really heard of before: Norco.
And, actually, interestingly enough, one of the first things I did when I got to New Orleans, through some friends that we had met, is I joined the Krewe of Underwear, which was one of the sub-krewes of Krewe du Vieux. I moved here in 1991 from San Francisco, where I’d gone to art school and lived for 13 years. A lot of our readers know your work, but can you also briefly introduce yourself and tell us about the inspiration behind Enigmatic Stream?
Richard, these landscapes were the focus of Enigmatic Stream. View of Norco petrochemical facilities from the west bank levee in Hahnville, Louisiana, featured in Enigmatic Stream by Richard Sexton. It’s really an exploration of New Orleans’s landscape, and also the types of people and personalities and communities and cultures that it has created and has the potential to create. The narrative of the game is constructed in a way where the landscape takes primacy in many ways. The three acts of the game are in many ways slightly disparate, but they all do tie into the industrial landscape of the river parishes and the suburbs of western greater New Orleans, so Kenner and Metairie. It’s intended to be a composite look at not only the region in Louisiana, but also the Trump era. It has a lot of nontraditional gameplay elements. The game itself uses a lot of classic adventure-game tropes, but at its heart, it is more of an interactive piece of media. YUTS: I’m from Norco, grew up in Norco, went to UNO, lived in New Orleans up until about three years ago, when my partner accepted a job in the Blue Ridge Mountain region of Virginia. Yuts, can you tell us about yourself and the game Norco? ( courtesy of Geography of Robots/Raw Fury) Oil refineries loom large in Norco, as they do in the town for which it is named.
The following is an edited transcript of that conversation. I asked Richard to join me for a conversation with Yuts to discuss what makes Norco such a compelling artistic subject. The town of Norco-or, rather, the petrochemical complexes lining the riverfront in Norco-also recently graced the cover of Enigmatic Stream: Industrial Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi River, by photographer Richard Sexton and published by THNOC. Norco, the video game that Yuts and the collective known as Geography of Robots created about his hometown of Norco, Louisiana (approximately 25 miles west of New Orleans), launched to critical acclaim in March, and has been billed by the game publishing platform Steam as “a Southern Gothic point-and-click narrative adventure that immerses the player in the sinking suburbs and verdant industrial swamps of a distorted South Louisiana.” Distinguished by its hauntingly gorgeous pixel artwork and engrossing storyline, Norco won the Tribeca Film Festival’s inaugural award for game design and has captivated gamers and non-gamers alike. Such was the case for the game developer and geographer known pseudonymously as Yuts. When these behemoths tower over your tiny hometown, though, you have little choice but to get acquainted, and perhaps even come to find beauty in this alien landscape. You’d be forgiven, however, for not really knowing what goes on here-or not wanting to find out. If you’ve driven the River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, or caught a glimpse of the flickering refineries off in the distance from I-10, you probably have a sense of the heavy industrial presence all along the lower Mississippi River. ( C ourtesy of Geography of Robots / Raw Fury ) Scene from Norco, a sci-fi adventure game based on the creator’s Louisiana hometown.
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