If you’ve ever wanted to explore or revisit Milwaukee as it was in the ‘90s, your chance is coming soon.
For the past year, Milwaukee resident and DIY game-developer Rich Altenbach has been building a virtual map of the East Side as it was in 1994. It’s part of his project Cream City Chaos: Origins — an open-world PC game that’ll be available on Steam in late summer or early fall of 2027.
Origins is a prequel to Murder Generation: Cream City Chaos, an arcade game Altenbach built in 2023 to promote his band Murder Generation. That game still resides at Last Rites in Walker’s Point.
“Much like life on the East Side as a teenager, there's really not a goal. You can just run around and explore and just see what the city used to look like.”
A series of absurd misadventures
Cream City Chaos: Origins is something of a cross between Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and a less violent Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. As your character explores the East Side, you skate your way through a series of absurd misadventures and mini-games around the neighborhood.
“Much like life on the East Side as a teenager, there's really not a goal,” says Rich Altenbach. “You can just run around and explore and just see what the city used to look like.”
Along the way, you meet a diverse cast of punks, ravers, goths and skaters who populate the map. Altenbach says hoped to represent all the major subcultures and “teenage cultural touchstones of the era."
“As you find new people, new characters, you unlock more options of what to do,” he explains.
On one mission, someone gives you a tab of LSD — which lets you jump super high as you chase a psychedelic gnome across the rooftops. On another, you throw dodgeballs at drunk zombies until a bulldozer comes through to clear them off the street.
East Side landmarks past & present
The game features a wide variety of East Side landmarks past and present — all rendered with painstaking period accuracy.
“I'm trying to be as accurate as I reasonably can, without going through and modeling every little brick and every little detail,” Altenbach says. “It’s kinda broad-stroke, but it’s as accurate as possible.”
The heart of the map is the iconic intersection at North and Farwell Avenue. Spots like Landmark Lanes, Von Trier and the Oriental Theatre figure prominently. But Altenbach says an early build of the iconic Oriental Drugs storefront was the jumping off point for the whole project.
“As soon as I started working on Oriental Drugs, that's when I was kind of like, ‘Alright, I’ve got to turn this into something. This is too cool,'” he says.
The Globe East is in there too — another departed favorite. “Midwest Ska Fest” can be read on the marquee. And if you walk up close enough, you can hear The Pacers playing inside.
“[The Globe was a] music venue that had a lot of all-ages shows. A lot of my friends' bands played there back in the day,” Altenbach says.
More recent losses appear in the game too. There’s Beans & Barley, complete with the Esoteria goth club downstairs — now Nine Below mini-golf bar.
And if you take the 21 bus over to Riverwest, you can explore the interior of the old Fuel Cafe — now The Daily Bird. Hippies playing hacky sack can be seen in the alley outside.
Altenbach says popular demand left him with little choice but to include the beloved Center Street cafe.
“A lot of people were mentioning how any game set on the East Side needs [Fuel] — and they’re not wrong,” Altenbach says.
Altenbach's research process
In June, Altenbach made waves on Reddit and local Facebook groups when he shared screenshots from the game — along with an open invitation for mid-’90s photos of the East Side.
“A lot of people came out of the woodwork,” he says. “A lot of recommendations: ‘Oh, you should put this in here; you should put this in there.’ So I put together a Google Doc and some links so people could contribute.”
That submission link is still up. But crowdsourcing photos hasn’t been as fruitful as Altenbach hoped. He’s found much better luck with the Milwaukee County Historical Society.
“I spent an afternoon there, going through just tons of photographs — and even going through their business directories,” he says. “So I'm going through, like, ‘Alright, what was on North Murray during this time period?’ Like trying to fill in the gaps.”
Building a map of the East Side
Building the game has been a tedious process: hundreds of hours of 3-D modeling in Blender, texturizing in Photoshop and cross-referencing historical photos with Google Street View.
“For everything I build for it, I have to build a ton,” Altenbach says. “In order to have one building, I need to build that entire street. I have to build what's across the street, and then I also have to go one block in both directions.”
Earlier in the project, Altenbach says he took “shortcuts,” relying on quick and dirty “placeholder” buildings to fill space. But as development continued, he’s found that a higher level of verisimilitude could unlock more memories for players.
“If somebody could quiz you on the color of the duplex three houses down ... you’re not gonna remember that stuff,” he says. “But if you're in a re-creation of that, and it's accurate or inaccurate, part of you knows the difference.”
Uncanny familiarity
He recalls one duplex in particular that he modeled as a placeholder. It did the trick at first, he says. But as time went on, something didn’t feel quite right. He decided to take another pass at it, paying closer attention to old photos of the place.
“As soon as I swapped it out and ran over there, it was just a wave of memory,” he says.
It’s that feeling he’s been after ever since.
“There's this really odd sensation that I've had a lot of trouble trying to articulate clearly,” he says. “But seeing a re-creation of something from the past that is eerily accurate — I mean, there is kind of this uncanny valley aspect, but there was a familiarity to it too.”
The first time Altenbach’s wife, Rebecca, gave the game a test run, he knew he was on the right track.
“She’s running around in it, and she knows where everything is — but she's never played it before!” he explains. “I could tell her to go to like Jalisco's, or go to wherever. I could mention a place or a street, and she'd know exactly where to go, and it would be familiar.”
The game has a long way to go. But since he’s just a hobbyist, Altenbach doesn’t have to deal with brutal gaming industry deadlines. For now, he's taking his time on all the little details, hoping to share that sense of uncanny familiarity with future players.
“That's the feeling I'm kind of chasing,” he says. “I'm really hoping I can get some people to try it out who lived in that area at the time, just to see if that feeling persists — to see if that's consistent across other players.”
'Grand Theft Auto' in Milwaukee?
With the long-awaited release of Grand Theft Auto VI set for November, I asked Altenbach what his vision would be for a GTA game set in Milwaukee.
"If I had a billion dollar-budget and thousands of people working for me and 15 years to make a game, I would explore the heck out of that," he said. "And I'd probably make it take place over the course of an entire generation. "
He remarks how GTA games like San Andreas and Vice City captured "a shared cultural experience of a time."
And with Cream City Chaos: Origins, he may have captured just that.
To follow along with the project, you can check out Altenbach’s website or YouTube channel. You can listen to WUWM Digital Producer Graham Thomas’ conversation with Rich Altenbach above.
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