The Only Thing RoboCop: Rogue City Needs Is Good Politics

thegamer.com:

I’ve seen a lot of hesitant comments about Nacon’s just-announced RoboCop: Rogue City. Some people are worried that the first-person combat won’t accurately represent the robotic motion RoboCop is known for. I’ve also seen concerns that RoboCop’s Auto-9 pistol doesn’t have film-accurate sound effects. While these worries sound fairly trivial, they both reflect a fear that Nacon’s game won’t accurately depict RoboCop. Rather than worry about the sound of his gun or the way he pivots his torso when he moves, we should be asking about RoboCop’s politics. Frankly, if Nacon isn’t prepared to tackle corporate privatization and the militarization of the police in America, then it has no business making a RoboCop game.

There’s nothing subtle about RoboCop’s politics. Like most dystopian cyberpunk stories, RoboCop depicts a futuristic world where deregulation and unrestricted capitalism has turned America into a corporatocracy. Vast wealth inequality and the privatization of social services like health care and law enforcement has turned Detroit into a violent, crime-ridden hellscape. There’s no mystery who the villains are or who is responsible for making things this way. Even the most surface-level reading of RoboCop will understand that the boardroom full of suits designing crime-stopping death machines are the real bad guys, and Boddicker and his gang are merely products of their hopeless environment.

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But RoboCop isn’t just a critique of capitalism broadly, it was specifically made as a commentary of American life in the 1980s. The collapse of Detroit’s auto industry in the ‘60s led to economic ruin, irrevocable unemployment, and skyrocketing crime rates in the city.