Video game writing is not great literature. No matter how deep is the lore or how many codex entries can be found, a good book will always be a better read than a good game. That is not to say game writing is drek, The Elder Scrolls franchise is full of pretty good short stories. Nothing you would read in English class, but rarely anything you would think is terrible. Freelancer is one of my all time favorite games and one major reason is the writing. The Elder Scrolls built an entire mythology from scratch but Freelancer did the opposite. Freelancer used many real-life locations and group names to build their universe which is why it works so well.
Freelancer if you don’t know is a space trading/combat sim set approximately 300 years in the future where humans have colonized the Sirius sector after evacuating Earth. There are four major areas: Liberty, Bretonia, Kusari, and Rheinland that align to America, England, Japan, and Germany. Solar systems, planets, station names, and factions are used as diegetic storytelling tools. This is where Freelancer’s writing truly shines.
Liberty is presented as a hyper-capitalist society. Liberty’s capital Planet Manhattan located in the New York system. Liberty Police Incorporated is a private company that handles all policing and monitoring of criminal activity in Liberty Space. The Texas system is one giant prison system where Liberty Police use prison labor for manufacturing. Synth Foods, a massive Liberty agribusiness corporation trying to gain access to new markets is at war with two “alternative fighting forces” (a choice description for criminal/terrorist organizations) the Farmer’s Alliance in Kusari and the LWB in Rheinland. These two groups of outlaws are trying to preserve their local farming culture against cheaper imports. All this information can be found in news broadcasts and naming conventions but are completely irrelevant to the game’s plot or gameplay. It is all optional.
Every year or so I’ll reinstall Freelancer and fool around for a few days. Each time I do, I learn new little nuggets of lore that have real-life counterparts. One of my favorites is a criminal base, Mactan, in the Magellan system. First the Magellan system is a border system away from the more heavily populated areas of New London or New York, which an outsider may have guessed simply from the name. Mactan is a pirate base the player must visit during the story. My first times through I never thought twice other than it’s a cool name. But then one day I was reading something and learned that Mactan is the real island where Ferdinand Magellan was killed in battle with the indigenous people. All of the sudden, a pirate base named Mactan in the Magellan system shows how well-read the Freelancer development team was. Another example of learning something new involves the Mollys, a Bretonian terrorist (alternative fighting force) organization centered around mining. I was reading something about real-life mining strikes and violence and came across the Molly Maguires.
I am sure that there dozens, probably hundreds of other examples of this sort of writing throughout Freelancer. I bet someone far more versed in Japanese or German history would find all sorts of cool notes in Kusari or Rheinland space. I don’t know if trawling the library and Wikipedia for names to use in a somewhat near future setting would work again. It seems like Freelancer did it so well because they decided to make it a priority. It is not easy to take something real and twist it just enough that it seems fresh and new but also tied enough to reality to be relevant.
The Keasy Depot 