In the previous part, I tried to account for what we know of Revachol from the text of the game and the various hints left by the developers. Which, as it turns out, is not a lot. So in order to construct a map of the city, and particularly in the details, we’re going to need to take a lot of artistic license. But that’s not to say there are no sources to draw on — indeed, we have several thousand years of urban development to draw on right here in the real world.
Of course, there are loads of different cities we could look at — humans have built their habitats very differently in different places at different times, due to factors ranging from physical geography to weather to available technology. We know Revachol’s climate is temperate, and that there’s still snow left in March, so combined with the origin of the developers I’m going to place it in Köppen climate zone Dfb — which includes the bulk of central and eastern Europe (including both shores of the Baltic) as well as a big chunk of North America and Hokkaido.
With that out of the way, three questions remain to be settled: what’s the technology level, how big is Revachol exactly, and what real-life cities could reasonably be said to be “equivalent” to it?
The first of these is both the easiest and the hardest. We do spend a fair amount of time in the game world, after all, and we see a fair amount of the technology it uses. It’s impossible to map this to any one specific time period in real life — there’s widespread air travel, computers (which do seem to work a bit differently from their real-life counterparts) and near-instantaneous global communications, but there are also things like muzzle-loading pistols and cars that look like converted stagecoaches. For our purposes, though, I think it’s safe to say Disco Elysium’s technology level is modern in nearly all the ways it matters — mainly as concerns transport.
The only place where it might have been useful to establish a more precise tech level is to help settle the second of our three questions. As far as I’ve been able to tell (and if I’m wrong, please, please let me know, it would be a godsend), no population figure for Revachol is ever given in-game. Given how weak Revachol’s government is, it seems plausible that no one would actually know the exact figure at any given time, but an approximate figure shouldn’t be too much to ask for. Anyway…
There are two clues we might use to figure this out. Firstly, although we never get a population estimate for Revachol, we do know that Mirova, another major city in the game world (very probably the biggest in the world), has a whopping twenty-two million inhabitants. This is on par with the biggest cities in the world today. If we assume that it is the biggest city in the world, the first city to cross the 20-million mark in real life was Tokyo, sometime in the 1960s.
“But that’s not Revachol”, you may say, and you’d be right. The other context clue is that map you can look at (“look at” meaning “read text about” for the player) in the in-game bookshop, which at one point mentions that “the Suzerainty of Revachol” has a radius of 80 kilometres. Now, the game is frustratingly vague on what exactly the Suzerainty is — whether it’s a word for the city itself or the colonial empire it once controlled. As we can see from the image below, a circle with an 80km radius comfortably surrounds both Tokyo and New York, the biggest cities of the 20th century and still two of the biggest cities by surface area in the world. So if this is the size of Revachol itself, it’s going to be enormous.
We also learn from Joyce Messier, the company negotiator who provides a lot of information about the world at large, that the island Revachol is on is self-sustaining and capable of feeding 200 million people. This, again, doesn’t tell us much about the actual city, but if we compare it to the most populous island of the real world — Java, with some 140 million inhabitants — we can learn something about the general scale on which we’re operating. Java is nowhere near self-sustaining (nowhere on Earth is, really), but if we assume Joyce is talking specifically about food, an island the size of, say, Borneo (except with a temperate climate rather than a tropical rainforest one) should be big enough to handle that without requiring its entire area to be farmland.
So unfortunately, this is a question that’s going to require some artistic license to answer. The thing about Revachol — the thing that defines it as a city — is that it’s well past its prime. Once upon a time, it was the world’s premier city and the ruler of a vast colonial empire. Then it had a revolution and civil war, got shelled to the ground and suffered half a century of foreign occupation. This sort of thing tends to stunt a city’s growth. I think in this respect, the closest equivalent we have in real life is Berlin, which had a population of 4.3 million in 1939 and about 3.6 million today. From the architecture and the general vibe I get, the time of the revolution feels sort of Edwardian in tone (even though it was only fifty years before the in-game present), so I’m going to shoot from the hip and say Revachol before the revolution was on par with the world’s biggest cities in 1914 in population.
The biggest city in the world in 1914 was London, which, like Revachol, derived much of its wealth and importance from being the seat of a globe-spanning colonial empire. Depending on how you count, its population in the 1911 census was either five million (within the administrative area) or 7.2 million (including outer suburbs). The equivalent figures for Paris were 2.8 or 4.5 million, and for Berlin 1.9 or somewhere around four million (the latter figure being for the amalgamated city post-war), while New York City’s five boroughs had 4.7 million inhabitants in 1910. With that in mind, and given that Berlin still has not reached its pre-war population peak, I’m going to say Revachol probably has somewhere in the order of five million inhabitants.
To turn to our final, even more nebulous question, I think New York is one of the best real-life sources of inspiration for Revachol. Aside from their similar climate and geography (having been built around a natural harbour at the mouth of a large river), the two cities share a fair bit of history: like Revachol, New York was founded by colonial powers from the Old World before going on to itself become the economic (though, unlike Revachol, not political) heart of its own colonial empire. Of course, the histories diverge in one important respect: New York never had a revolution, or rather, its revolution took place much earlier and was essentially bourgeois in character, helping it establish its place in the global economy rather than destroying it. And for that reason, New York has kept growing where Revachol stagnated, and most (I say most) of its working class is significantly better off than I imagine the common people of Revachol West are.
If we’re building a mood board of cities here, another North American city worth mentioning is Montréal, which shares with Revachol its climate, rough size and, most significantly, its French-speaking majority culture. For pure vibes, it’s probably about as close as you get in the real world, with its old French-style houses nestled among skyscrapers, its bohemian culture and its post-industrial, occasionally stagnant economy.
The other pair of cities that ran through my head as I played the game are in Southeast Asia. The post-revolutionary position of Revachol in the world — as essentially a combination tax haven, high-tech hub and shipping entrepot, run as a city-state under a somewhat benevolent business dictatorship — resemble no modern city quite as much as Singapore. Again, of course, there are significant differences — aside from the tropical climate, Singapore is also newer than Revachol. There have been cities on the Straits of Malacca for a very long time, but Singapore as we know it dates from the early 19th century, and its growth only really took off in the 20th. It’s also located on an island and not in a river delta. One thing it notably does have in common with Revachol is its position as a multiethnic settler colony — it was founded by the British, and its population has more or less always been majority Chinese, but never entirely so.
There is a city in the region whose history and geography are a closer match for Revachol — perhaps the closest of the ones we’ve talked about, at least in terms of geography, and that’s Jakarta.
Modern Jakarta (then called Batavia) was founded in 1619 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), on the ruins of an earlier settlement they themselves had razed to the ground after a disagreement with its ruler. It was built on a flat plain by the north coast of Java, and as the Dutch are wont to do, they dug a network of canals to allow merchant ships into the heart of the city. The city prospered through two centuries of company rule, and eventually grew onto the surrounding hills where a new administrative centre was built. Of course, this prosperity was not shared by most of the locals — the VOC ran Indonesia purely as a profit machine, and both slavery and various other forms of exploitation were commonplace. There was only ever a small Dutch minority in the city, mostly men who travelled there for adventure and profit and lived like kings for a few years before returning to the Netherlands. Some married into the local populace, using their wives as go-betweens and cultural interpreters, and a small community of biracial “Indos” remains in the city as a legacy of this period.
As mentioned, Jakarta was never a proper settler colony — although it did have a substantial Chinese minority for part of its history, it was mostly populated by the same ethnic groups who lived in the countryside around it. Even after the Dutch government took the colony over from the VOC, they never seriously attempted to impose their culture on it (although some regions saw heavy Christian mission activity, with all the abuses that usually entailed in a colonial empire), and when Indonesia became independent after the Second World War, they took over Jakarta and left very little trace of the Dutch other than the surviving colonial architecture and a few loanwords in the Indonesian language.
So that’s a few foundational thoughts on how Revachol relates to our world. A city of about five million people, built on and around a river delta on the north coast of a large island, settled by a combination of Old World natives (“Occidentals” in the game world’s terminology — white people, effectively) and indentured workers from the “third world” who did much of the heavy lifting in building the city, turned from a colony of the Old World to an independent kingdom to a great colonial empire, then briefly to a socialist republic and then effectively back to a colony again. Although of course, the rulers of the Zone of Control, which covers an 80km radius around the city and thus probably includes some rural land too, would fervently deny that they are running a colony, and insist that the city will get its independence back as soon as it’s ready for it. How the rest of the island is governed is unclear, but luckily for us, we don’t really have to untangle that knot now that we know the general size and layout of the city.
Next time, I promise, there will be maps.
