The Lighthouse Customer: GearCity

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, driving a car company into the ground with GearCity.

"Have you ever dreamed of running your own car company?" asks the website of GearCity, a simulation game that lets you run your own car company. My answer: no, I've never dreamed of running my own car company, at least until GearCity's website asked if I've ever dreamed of running my own car company. At which point I did. So, I decided to play GearCity to fulfil my minute-old dream. Of running my own car company.

Naturally, I want to begin where cars began: Detroit, Michigan! Sure, if you read up on the actual history of the automobile, they probably began in Germany, or France, or even China, depending on how you define automobile. Even the mass production of automobiles began in Lansing, Michigan, not Detroit, but look: I'm an American, and I'm used to history conforming to what I think happened rather than what actually did. So, I begin in Detroit, in 1900, and being an American, I decide to make the world's first car a really, really big one. We dream big, we build big.

I begin in the R&D department, selecting the largest auto body I can find, and then begin playing with the game's sliders to make it even larger. I pull up the roof, extend the cabin, drag the front fender forwards and the rear fender back. I'm not sure what kind of roads exist here in 1900, but I'm going to require they be made much, much wider.

I throw on some wheels and then some tires, making them as thick and chunky as possible -- I might as well deplete the world's supply of rubber while I'm at it -- and slap on a single enormous headlight, the better to blind any oncoming horses with my sheer awesomeness. I super-size the door-handles as well, because why not, and I decide to leave off the taillights. Why do I need to signal that I'm stopping? I don't plan to stop driving for anything, and if I do, it'll be someone else's problem. I put a mirror, presumably meant for the side of the car, on the rear, so anyone I speed past will see their own jealous expressions reflected back at them.

The only thing I've overlooked is that my steering wheel is on the passenger side, or the European side, of the car. What we here in the States call "the wrong side." Oh well! At least this way I can pull right up to food stands and purchase enormous slabs of meat and sugary beverages. Hey, I've just invented the drive-thru!

With my bright red behemoth designed, I retire to my office to let my turn-of-the-century eggheads build the prototype, and then begin production. I only have a single factory at the moment, but I crank up its production speed to full. This means they'll be built quickly, but not carefully, leading to a poorer product, but I don't want my cars to last forever. Gotta keep the buyer coming back for a new one every few weeks, right? I set the price at five times the production cost -- luxury like this ain't cheap -- and press the button, ready to produce this crimson beauty and drag my country into the next century, by which I mean the last century.

Uh. Okay. WOW. Just asking my factory to start cranking out these hideous cars has instantly caused my company to fail. No warning at all, either, except perhaps from all those angry notices piling up on my desk stating that my company has been losing massive amounts of money every month while I've been tied up building this one terrible car.

How massive is my failure? Rather than being able to start a new game, GearCity actually leaves me no choice but to exit to Windows, that's how bad it is. It's so bad that when I restart, my anti-virus software holds me up, deciding it needs to suspiciously examine the game's .exe file. Seriously. My own computer doesn't even trust me anymore.

Dream big, build big, fail completely. America! I guess I know what that revolver in my office safe is for. No, not to kill myself. I'm a CEO! I probably escaped with millions. The gun is to fend off the unemployed workers when they storm my mansion.

I start over, having learned my lesson. Time to spearhead the next generation of cars: tiny, efficient, and no fun at all. I open an office in China in 1980, hoping to produce an economy car. In the eighties, my office is nicely updated with a big clunky computer on the desk, and I can only assume I'm sitting behind it with a flock of seagulls haircut and the sleeves of my blazer rolled up to mid-forearm. I get back to work, designing a micro-car. (I know, it should be a minivan, but I just can't bring myself to do it.)

I build the cheapest, least-complicated car I can manage, and begin production -- slow, careful production this time, with a price tag just over the production cost. My new inexpensive car is packing 30 horsepower, gets 27 miles to the gallon, and can reach speeds of almost FORTY-FIVE miles per hour (70 kph!). The reviews of the "Sword Dirt" (the auto-assigned model name) are a bit unkind, but amazingly, I manage to get my little pink ride into the marketplace without destroying the company.

Well fine, Mister Hateful Reviewer -- who has probably never even designed a car of his own -- I'll just let the numbers speak for themselves. I've built eleven Sword Dirts, and guess how many I've sold? Eleven. That's right, they're buying them as fast as I can build them. Clearly, I've got a hit on my hands, and I decide to expand, setting my sights on France, where they really appreciate horrible tiny ugly cars. I build a factory in Paris (at great expense) and begin production (at great expense) and start advertising in newspapers, on the radio and television, and oh wait shit I've gone out of business again. I guess maybe I should have sold more than eleven cars before opening a second factory?

Well, I've learned I can't sell giant gas-guzzling incredibly expensive horrible cars and I can't sell tiny efficient amazingly cheap horrible cars. Next time, a mid-size, mid-efficiency, mid-priced car. But certainly still horrible.

This write-up is based on GearCity version 1.14.4 (it's been updated since). I found the experience more than a little fiddly: the design sliders work well but dragging/dropping accessories -- and sometimes even just clicking buttons -- was pretty clunky and awkward. I also had to play it in a window as the game always crashed when launched in full-screen. You can keep an eye on the game's update progress here, and you can (and should) also view the full series of short feature tutorials here.