When Melbourne Looks Like a Video Game

Someone posted a photo to the Melbourne subreddit this week that stopped me mid-scroll. It was taken just as power was being restored to the CBD after an outage, and it looks, genuinely, like concept art for a game that hasn’t been made yet.

Wet streets. Neon reflecting off everything. That particular quality of light you only get when half the city is dark and the other half is suddenly, violently bright again. A few people in the comments said “Cyberpunk 2077 vibes” and they’re not wrong, but it’s more specific than that. It looked like the moment in a story-driven RPG where you emerge from a sewer into the city for the first time and the game engine is showing off a bit. You half expect a quest marker to appear.

What gets me is that this is just Collins Street, or somewhere near it. A place I’ve walked through a hundred times on the way to a tram stop or a meeting I didn’t want to attend. Completely unremarkable on a Tuesday afternoon. But strip away the ordinary light, add a blackout, and suddenly the whole geometry of the place shifts. It becomes somewhere else.

There’s something in that worth sitting with. Cities have a fixed image of themselves that residents carry around. Melbourne is laneways and coffee shops and trams that are never quite on time. But the infrastructure underneath all that, the cables and substations and switching gear, is largely invisible until it fails. A power outage doesn’t just turn off the lights. It briefly reveals the skeleton of the thing.

The photo also reminded me that Melbourne genuinely is a beautiful city at night when the conditions are right, and most of us are too busy or too cold to notice. I’m not going to romanticise inconvenience; a CBD blackout is a real problem for a lot of people and businesses. Both things are true at once. The chaos produced a stunning image, and the chaos was still chaos.

Someone suggested crossposting it to a neon cities community. That feels right. It belongs in a collection of images where you can’t immediately tell which city you’re looking at: Tokyo, Seoul, somewhere fictional. For one wet evening, Melbourne was that.