Richard Night

Richard Alix Night was a business man best known as the founder of Night City (originally named Coronado City).

Biography
At a young age, Richard Night became a partner in a construction company called Halsey, Ferris and Night, which was a firm tackling massive corporate construction projects. With hard effort and excellent results, the firm prospered and all three partners became very wealthy men. By 1990 however, working on office plazas and corporate structures started to not be enough for Richard Night. He became dissatisfied with his experiences in managing corporate construction projects as part of his company and this led him to break off and form his own firm - Night International - with the end goal of creating the ideal city.

An ambitious young man, Night had a dream of creating a city of the future so grand that all cities built before or after it would pale in comparison, and they would look it up to as the gold standard. With immense design and visionary aspirations, he drew up plans for Night International to make this utopian city a reality. His next move was to secure the unheard amount of capital needed to finance the gargantuan project. In Night's idealistic city, governments would be run by the corporations allowing optimum zoning and no anti-business elements to interfere with corporate growth. Ideally, it would be a capitalist mecca of opportunity. After the Collapse, many of the megacorps also looked at creating such a space, in which crime and poverty were non-existent, as well as the laws that impeded their sometimes unethical work.

By 1992, Arasaka, EBM and Petrochem had all signed on with Night and all that was left was to find the ideal location to build. From the beginning, Night focused on the central Californian coast due to its seaport potential, lush environment, and an ideal location for an intercontinental maglev. Interestingly enough, whilst drafting a buy-in package with Petrochem, it was discovered that the megacorp owned the rights to drilling and most of the land situated around the Del Coronado Bay region. Night purchased many of the rights as well as large swaths of land surrounding the bay from Petrochem to secure the land for the new city.

By 1993, Coronado City, Richard Night's dream metropolis, was well under construction. Night's plan involved a bay which accommodated bulk carriers, a picturesque old downtown and a gigantic corporate plaza, the new heart of the city. Much of the bay was dredged and the upper peninsula was extended. The existing residents of Del Coronado were relocated to a new area known as Old Downtown and the central hub of the city, where the corporations were based, would be the new downtown area. During its construction however, Night International used a large number of advanced building styles and techniques which didn't include archaic methods being used by older companies.

His old associates of Halsey, Ferris and now Skiv were excluded during the building process. Furthermore, they had unwisely joined with a local mob figure who had a domineering presence over the NorCal region. Via his scorned ex-colleagues, Night received frequent threats to his life within the first 4 years of the construction of Coronado City. A proud and self-reliant man, he typically ignored these threats. When the threats escalated, he called in for backup from his corporate partners who dealt with the issue swiftly and ruthlessly.

Night's luck eventually did run out however, and was shot and killed in his penthouse suite in the newly constructed Parkview Tower on September 10th 1998. The killer was never found, and in his memory the newly appointed city council renamed Coronado City as Night City in his honor.

Trivia

 * The character Andrew Ryan from the Bioshock series had a similar ideology and vision as Richard Night.