RPS: Your setting is Mars, but what kind of Mars? Because there are lots of Mars-es. Wacky Mars, pseudo-realistic Mars, entirely realistic Mars which is completely dead and really boring, Mars bars, etc.
Johnson: I think we’re probably somewhere in the middle. It’s not really hard sci-fi. The reason you colonize Mars is so you can supply food to people in the Asteroid Belt. You have people on Mars. They create water and oxygen and food, and they ship that to the Asteroid Belt, because Mars is a lot smaller than earth. It cost a lot less fuel to get ships off of Mars than Earth. So even though obviously it’s a lot easier to grow food on earth, it takes a larger amount of fuel to escape Earth’s gravity. So that’s theoretically one of the ideas behind the usefulness of Mars.
Though at the same time, we have some somewhat goofy technology. Teleportation, perpetual motion, cold fusion, just some stuff that type of futurism and whatnot. It’s not something I would ever put forward as, “This is an educational game about Mars.” It’s just a nice setting. What I really like about the setting is it’s a plausible empty environment that will get developed quickly with modern stuff. We could theoretically make this game in the new world of 1500, right? But you don’t really have an energy market to produce interesting resources quickly. Things happen a lot more slowly. This is a nice place to be able to start with an empty map, which is always a real nice thing in a strategy game.
