Lost Future breakdown (Spoilers).

I played the game when I was a child. I remembered it recently and aside from reminiscing on how great the game was, I realised how incredibly nonsensical and implausible the idea of an underground copy of London is:

• Recreating something the size of London, which in the 1960s (or whatever the time Lost Future was set in), would require unprecedented excavation of the subterranean caverns they used.

• Building a copy of London would be arguably the greatest mega project in the UK today, let alone in that time, so it would require a network of civil engineering and project management companies corresponding with each other and working over the course of at least 25-30 years, yet they got a realistic replica done underground from scratch in… 10 years? Fewer?

• The funding would be astronomical. Clive’s inheritance wouldn’t even scratch the surface. It would cost hundreds of billions minimum? Even if they somehow managed to get sponsorships, they’re not raising that amount of money. They would also need massive supply chains, contractors and thousands of workers who don’t talk. They can’t build a mega city in secrecy without people talking.

• If building the city wasn’t crazy enough, they also managed to populate it. The population of London in the time the game is set would’ve been at least 7 million, so to have a convincing population, they would need hundreds of thousands of people to willingly live there and maintain the lie. Thats something not even intelligence agencies could come near to achieving, yet it’s done by a small team of scientists, builders and a resentful young man.

• The underground city must have a physical boundary since it’s in a cavern. How was Clive counting on someone not simply walking too far? Or noticing that there aren’t any national railway networks that go out of London?

• The final nail in the coffin: the weather. How does it rain? How does it snow? And how in the literal f*** did they go about constructing day and night mechanics? Did Clive build also build a copy of the sun and moon from scratch?

I know it’s a fictional game where time travel is plausible, but the game actively tries to rationalise everything when the professor exposes Clive and Dimitri in the Thames’ Arms, which makes you realise the idea of them secretly building an underground copy of London is absolute bs 😭