The Pacific Northwest is scary.
From the dark woods of Alan Waketo the ghostly radios of Oxen free, for the absolute freaks who populate it Deadly premonition, so many games set in the old Pacific Northwest indicate that strange sauce.
This Weird Pacific Northwest trend also exists outside of games – of quirky characters Portlandia to the terrifyingly wet environment of The ring.
I wanted to know why that is, so I started looking.
I’ve come up with 122 games, mostly set in Washington (go Huskies). After we narrowed it down to 35, the themes of Pacific Northwest Bingo started to become clearer.
IMAGE: Simone de Rochefort/Polygon
Sixteen games were what I would describe as “creepy;” 22 of them have a supernatural element, and others emphasize survival and nature. One takes place in a coffee shop. And quite a few are mysteries.
But not these trends get started with video games.
Long before games made the Pacific Northwest weird, TV and movies were blazing that trail, and probably the most notable is Twin Peaks.
It’s me, the Twin Peaks enjoyer. I’m logged in.
David Lynch’s soapy, surreal murder mystery debuted in April 1990 and became the blueprint for many water cooler shows today.
At first glance, Twin Peaks is quaint and safe. But gradually a seedy underbelly of gambling, sex trafficking and drug trafficking is revealed – not to mention the actual crime that fuels the entire show. Besides all of them Thatthe supernatural goes from implied to terribly real and dangerous.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to talk about Pacific Northwest media without talking about it Twin Peaks. But the story goes deeper than that. Along the way, I spoke with Stephen Groening, associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Washington, about how influential this is Twin Peaks really was – and what Washington state looks like now, after decades of entrenchment by companies like Amazon and Microsoft.
I also spoke to Alex Dracott, creative director and studio head of Ironwood Studios, the outfit behind it Pacific drive. Pacific drive is a gritty, complex game in which the player drives a beat-up old sedan through the Olympic Peninsula – even though it is an Olympic Peninsula besieged by strange, deadly anomalies after an experiment went wrong.
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