01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sunday World
New video game will be an ‘anti-capitalist Grand Theft Auto' ride through the Docklands
According to game-makers, players will be able to 'smash through Dublin and its all-American politics, two-tiered employment and skyrocketing homelessness'
A screengrab from the new game
A new video game set in Dublin's Docklands promises gamers an 'anti-capitalist Grand Theft Auto' experience.
Grand Canal Demolition Derby (GCDD) is a PS1-style game with the action taking place between Dublin's Grand Canal Dock and Saol Eile 'a spectral otherworld'.
According to game-makers NAMACO, players will be able to 'smash through Dublin and its all-American politics, two-tiered employment and skyrocketing homelessness'.
They will learn about the Free State's over-reliance on America, 'from centuries of colonial limitations imposed by Britain, to the substitution of indigenous industry with US investment from the 1950s onwards'.
It also features the 'buyout of Irish housing by investment funds from 2008'.
The game's various missions include 'thrashing the Teslas, smashing the servers and maiming the mainframes of American tech companies'.
These all server as metaphors 'for the shift from US tech dominance to a socialised economy, where industries and housing are publicly owned and the beneficiaries are ordinary people, not billionaires'.
The game was created by NAMACO, which is headed by Donal Fullam, Assistant Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries at UCD's School of Art History, and artist Hannah Hogan, in collaboration with 3D artist Peter Jessiman.
It will be launched next week at the 2025 Connolly Festival starting on Monday, May 6.
Connolly Festival coordinator, Aaron Nolan, said the new game will allow players to 'rampage through the so-called Glittering Silicon Docks and take on our Tech Overlords Google, X, Meta, Amazon and Apple'.
'The aim is to fight those who thrive on profit hyper-exploitation and seek the total obliteration of our communities,' Nolan said.
A screengrab from the new game
Today's News in 90 seconds - Thursday, May 1
'Players explore the historical roots of Ireland's lack of state and indigenous industry, and confront the modern fallout of over-reliance on US capital.'
He added: 'It also features a guest appearance from Joe Duffy's Liveline, as callers discuss the Ireland's artificially inflated GDP which obscures deep social inequalities, it's political landscape which is shaped to appease American interests and the precarity of having an economy that is acutely vulnerable to downturns in global markets.'
Last year, Fullam and Hogan created Mega Dreoilín, an art project in the form of a 16-bit video game.
It was shown as part of an exhibition in Pallas Projects/Studios in The Liberties, Dublin in May 2024.
In the game, the player navigates the Irish housing crisis, encountering characters including James Connolly, Manchán Magan, Ian Lynch and Rory Hearne, and locations such as The Cobblestone and Guineys.
The Connolly Festival is a celebration of trade union leader James Connolly, who was executed on May 12, 1916 for his part in leading the Easter Rising.
