Monarch Solutions, the corporation Paul Serene founded when he traveled back in time to 1999 to prepare for the End of Time, plays a huge role in Quantum Break. In the game, it’s your enemy; in the show, it’s the focus. We set out to create a corporation that would feel like a huge, real, authentic entity on all different levels.
We hired Nimiö, an agency that builds brands for companies, to help us conceptualize the branding for Monarch Solutions. Together we created a brand guide with rules just as company brands have in the real world.
The Monarch brand appears all around in both the game and the show. The core of the Monarch identity is the brand mark: a stylized butterfly symbol. This appears in every application connected to Monarch. The idea is naturally tied to the concept of Time Travel, Paul Serene’s power to shape the future with his Junction power, and the butterfly effect.
Shard-like shapes and the color yellow are strongly present in the company brand. Monarch architecture is Fractured and angular, creating a look of prismatic futurism.
This has been inspired by the look of time energies, the heart of what Monarch Solutions is about.
The events of Quantum Break happen in Riverport, a small fictional East Coast city with a university and a history of heavy industry and shipbuilding. The industry has not been what it used to be for a long time and the city has struggled, until Monarch Solutions appears and brings a new age of prosperity with it. We wanted to bring contrast into the setting with this, a sense of layers and history and change that’s especially important when dealing with Time Travel. Monarch’s ultra-modern architecture juxtaposed against the old buildings of Riverport look and feel all the more striking. With this we also wanted to create a feel of dread, of Monarch taking over, devouring the old. This idea of contrasts, of old and new side by side and on top of each other, is present all around the game environments.
When it comes to the technology in the game, and especially the Chronon technology used by Monarch Solutions, we looked for inspiration in real present day science and technology. Even though Quantum Break is a science fiction story, we endeavored to create a feel that if what happens in the game would be possible in the real world, the technology would look like it does in the game. For inspiration, we turned to fusion reactors, NASA, and particle accelerators of CERN. For the Monarch Chronon tech elite troops, the vision was to create suits that would look like “militarized NASA” technology.
For the in-game monitors and the 2D visual style, we turned to real scientific visualizations. We wanted to make it raw and believable. We also researched the NASA style guide from the ‘70s for this purpose. This style was also used for the menus and the user interface of the game.
