Creating Riverport

Creating a new fictional place is always a great deal of fun, but it also provides significant challenges.

In the case of Riverport, we knew that we wanted to create a believable East Coast city that was clearly past its prime due to an economic downturn. We had no specific real-world counterpart to model the city after, but we designed the physical flow of a river, various bridges, a dry dock, a harbor, and all other associated logic of a mid-sized port town.

What was specifically fascinating to develop was the degree of impact that a powerful company like Monarch Solutions would have on a town like Riverport—and how that impact would be felt architecturally and sociologically.

Quantum Break opens with a protest of some of the citizens of Riverport against the planned demolition of an old library building at Riverport University. The tension in town had to feel as real as possible, as it’s a key to the believability of the entire world of Quantum.