Kani Kanizawa Makes a McDonald’s Drive-Thru the Only Way In or Out of a Suburb

ATELIER LIVE — Kani Kanizawa, a crab-themed streamer with Atelier Live, spent a stream titled “a typical day on /r/urbanplanning” building a deliberately car-dependent city in Car Park Capital. She finished with a suburb whose residents could only enter or leave their homes by driving through a McDonald’s drive-thru.

The stream opened with chat urging her to be buttered, a running joke about her crab persona. “I am not edible and I will not be getting buttered,” she said, before turning to the game. In Car Park Capital, the player is hired by a firm called Big Auto to build parking and persuade residents to move to the suburbs and drive in. She played the part with enthusiasm, paving over a transit-served downtown, buying up land, putting up billboards that read “You love cars,” and sending riot police after protesters. She declared that she hated walkable cities.

“You have to go through the McDonald’s to get to your house.” — Kani Kanizawa, on the neighborhood she built

Her centerpiece came more than an hour and a half in. She built homes behind a drive-thru so that the only road in and out ran through it. “Look at this. You have to go through the McDonald’s to get to your house,” she said. Leaving required the same route, and some residents ended up stuck in a loop at the drive-thru. She later showed the neighborhood to newly arrived viewers and described it as an amazing invention.

Chat played along with the satire. One viewer wrote, “how DARE these pedestrians walk to work and groceries,” and another, “evil enough to make a grown up villain cry.” The stream drew five Super Chats.

Between building sessions she paid her respects to BioWare and asked viewers what to play next, weighing Mass Effect against Knights of the Old Republic II, which she noted was made by Obsidian. She settled on the latter for the following day and said she was steering her channel toward Star Wars games. Next week she plans either a themed chat stream about old convention horror stories or a ranking of every American state’s national dish.