In The New Yorker, in a piece called The Grammar of Fun, Tom Bissell looks at Epic Games, its hit, Gears of War, and its infamous design director, CliffyB, or Cliff Bleszinski — who makes an interesting aside about futuristic backdrops:
Bleszinski asked his artists to create a “sci-fi” hybrid of London and Washington, D.C., but advised them to keep the futuristic well balanced with the historical. The big flaw in most depictions of the future, he says, “is that they always forget to leave in the past. Everyone always assumes that the entire world would just explode and be rebuilt in this kind of super-futuristic style. I still see old cars from the thirties and forties around, right next to things that look like they’re from the year 2000. It’s that mix that makes things interesting.”