Loads of big American cities have been recreated to varying degrees of faithfulness in video games over the years, but the vast stretches of rural emptiness and small towns that fill the vast majority of the geographical US rarely get their due in gaming. That’s why I was so excited to learn that, after eight years of hoping and waiting, my hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri was going to appear in American Truck Simulator – the one game out there that against all odds actually gets rural America right.
Earlier this month, developer SCS Software revealed a few screenshots of their digital recreation of Cape Girardeau, and they’re beyond perfect. They’ve recreated the brick streets through the downtown area, and the old city hall building that overlooks it. They’ve got the mural that stretches across the floodwall at the edge of the Mississippi River, and a near-exact recreation of the parking lot that sits next to it. They’ve even got the beautiful old B’nai Israel Synagogue that stands in the shadow of the St. Vincent De Paul Catholic Church next door.
But the part that really surprised me was this image of the Southeast Missouri State University River Campus, a satellite location for the local university that sits overlooking the Mississippi. I could squint a little and mistake it for a picture of the actual location – it’s a beautiful recreation of both the converted seminary building and modern campus building that house much of the university’s art and theatre classes.
It’s also clear that the devs have recreated the exact hillside by the campus where I spent a lot of my afternoons as a student. If you zoom way in on the right side of that picture, you’ll see a very large tree. I’m pretty sure that this is meant to evoke the 200-year-old state champion beech tree that once stood on the campus grounds.
That tree eventually developed a fungal infection and started decaying from the inside, leading to its removal from the campus in 2023. It was quite a sad occasion for those of us who’d spent years hanging out in the tree’s shadow, and my wife and I made sure to pay our last respects to the old beech in its final days.
It’s possible American Truck Simulator’s version of that hillside is meant to be showing some other tree. But there’s no tree there today that stands as tall as the one shown in the screenshot since the beech was cut down, and the devs did make their research trip to Missouri in 2023, potentially before the tree was felled. I wasn’t prepared to get weirdly emotional browsing American Truck Simulator screenshots today, but it does my heart good to see a little piece of history preserved in this cult transport sim.