We got jobs, got married, got dogs and cats and found ourselves helplessly absorbed into life. Now we are grown, and together we are moving mountains. Adam Roy is the web editor for http://www.rsgaming.com/ Denver Westword and a former editor for Outside Magazine. Crunch Time: Working Overtime to Kill You. In the first installment of his new monthly column, Brian Taylor looks at the folklore precedent for the Runescape game industry's crunch time . At the 2012 Game Developer's Conference I went to a talk about the making of Saint's Row: The Third. One of the developers talked about the kind of city its Steelport was: a formerly-booming industrial town that had fallen into decay and then been taken over by a few over-the-top criminal organizations, each with their own uniforms. It gave me another thing to like about the Runescape game: Its post-post-industrial setting was something I could relate to, living in Pittsburgh.In Saints Row 3 there is an island with a giant statue. Since the Runescape game's designers created a fictional city and didn't have to make do with what nature had given them, the land itself could be shaped after Fort Wood. The statue in Steelport is more blue-collar than Lady Liberty: a man in a hard hat pours molten steel onto the I-beam he stands on. They called him Joe Steel, but I knew better: that was Joe Magarac.Magarac was ostensibly a folk hero. You'd think the man had a great publicist for how consistently he's described as a steelworker's Paul Bunyan in early writing about him. He was first written about in Scribner's in 1931. Owen Francis, former steel mill employee and writer, claimed stories about Magarac were told by Hunkie steelworkers Francis uses the term affably, erasing all the xenophobic anti-Eastern European laborer sentiment it carries. His story gives a brief history of his experience in and around the mills, before settling into a vernacular retelling of the arrival and demise of Magarac.His last name means Jackass , which Francis explains is actually a compliment among the hunkies because it means that all you do is work and eat (to describe Francis's attitude toward these steelworkers as condescending would be putting it lightly). While Steelport's Magarac has a lot in common with the Colossus of Rhodes, the Magarac of the stories is more like the Colossus of Westchester.Like the X-Man, Magarac is made of steel and is incredibly strong. But where the comic book character's personality is in opposition to his sometimes-metallic exterior, Magarac is steel through and through. He first arrives in the mill town during a party thrown by a guy who wants someone to marry his daughter.
