Why are creepy games always set in Washington?

The Pacific Northwest in video games is pretty uniformly creepy, dark, and wet. But how did it get like that? Polygon’s Simone de Rochefort traces the history of the Pacific Northwest in media, from Alan Wake 2 and Pacific Drive, all the way back to Twin Peaks — and the new high-tech world that we live in now, dominated by Amazon and Microsoft.

0:00 The Pacific Northwest is always creepy
1:06 What is the Pacific Northwest
1:55 What video games am I talking about?
5:39 The setting
12:26 The people
17:56 The supernatural
20:43 Modern Seattle

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Why’s the Pacific Northwest always so Weird? From the dark forests of Alan Wake — to the ghostly radios of Oxenfree — to the absolute freaks who populate Deadly Premonition — so many games set in the ol’ PNW give it that WEIRD SAUCE. Now, I was born and raised in Washington state, and it’s not that weird! I spent most of my childhood running happily around in the woods. Where I grew up, we had these military bunkers in the forest, dating to the early 1900s. As kids, we’d go in and feel our way down these long, concrete tunnels, some of them so pitch black you can’t see anything in front of your face. I remember trailing my fingers along the cool damp walls, feeling my way — until one day — another hand reached back… Nah! Nothing weird ever happened. We did play in those tunnels though. ANYWAY. This trend of Weird Pacific Northwest exists outside of games too — from quirky characters in Portlandia to the terrifyingly wet environment of The Ring. I wanted to know why that is, so I started looking. First off… What is the Pacific Northwest? It’s a region of the United States and Canada that encompasses Oregon, Washington, and parts of Idaho, as well as British Columbia. These states were relatively late additions to the USA, and of course they’re still home to the indigenous tribes whose languages provide names for much of the region. Iconic Pacific Northwest-set shows and movies include Frasier, Twin Peaks, Grey’s Anatomy, The Goonies, Bates Motel, which my boss made me include on this list, and Twilight. British Columbia, thank you tax breaks, was also the shooting location for shows like Supernatural and the X-Files. Anyway, forget about the Pacific Northwest being all THIS because where TV and movies are concerned, it’s basically just This. In the cultural imagination the area is more often associated with damp old growth forests than, say, the scrubland of Eastern Washington. I wanted to check my bias when it comes to games set in the Pacific Northwest having weird vibes at all, which means we’re hitting the OL’ WIKIPEDIA. I came up with 122 games, mostly set in Washington GO HUSKIES. BUt not every game is representative of the region — Mass Effect 3 is about SPACE not VANCOUVER. I cut sports games because they’ll host the Winter Olympics ANY DANG WHERE, and also games that are just adaptations of TV shows and movies. -Bailey: Tell the Chief we have a highly infectious disease on our hands. -Simone: I ended up with a manageable 35 games to think about. And none in Idaho. TYPICAL. Through this list, we can play Pacific Northwest Media Bingo: 16 games were what I would describe as “creepy,” 22 of them have a supernatural element, and others emphasize survival and nature. One is set in a coffee shop. And quite a few are mysteries. But these trends didn’t start with video games. Long before games made the Pacific Northwest weird, TV and movies were carving that trail, and the most notable is probably TWIN PEAKS. It’s me, the Twin Peaks enjoyer. I’ve logged on. David Lynch’s soapy, surreal murder mystery debuted in April 1990, and became what is possibly the first water-cooler TV show: one that everyone tuned in to watch live, so they could discuss it the next day. It’s about an FBI agent, Dale Cooper, who arrives in a small Washington town to catch Laura Palmer’s killer. But Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost didn’t really care about the murder mystery: they just wanted to tell stories about this small town. Stories like, woman gets hit on the head and develops super strength. Or, man is obsessed with sandwiches. Or, child does magic tricks with creamed corn. -Pierre: Sometimes things can happen just like this. (SNAP) -Mrs. Tremond: Creamed corn!!!! -Simone: You know! Normal stuff. On the surface, Twin Peaks is quaint and safe. But gradually, a seedy underbelly of gambling, sex trafficking, and drug running is revealed — to say nothing of the actual crime that instigates the whole show. Alongside that, the supernatural goes from implied, to very real and dangerous. Twin Peaks destroys at Pacific Northwest Bingo. But it feels too freaking simple to say that the stereotypes started here. -Stephen Groening: Twin Peaks could be cited as a turning point … -Simone: Wait, the stereotypes did start here!? -Stephen Groening: My name is Steven Groening. I’m an associate professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. So there’s a lot of stuff I think, that after Twin Peaks said, Okay, creepy, supernatural, rainy and dark. We’ll just do it. You know, lean into that. -Simone: I’m so smart. The TV industry in the 1990s was a lot smaller than it is now — Twin Peaks was a huge hit, but it also wasn’t competing with a million other small-town detective shows. And most television at the time was shot in New York or LA, and was either set there or had the faceless, placeless character of a confined set. So Twin Peaks really did stand out more than it might have otherwise. -Stephen Groening: So maybe you had five channels if you were lucky. You know, Twin Peaks was right there at that time when television is expanding, channel-wise, and more diverse as well. So marking that as a sort of beginning point, in a way makes sense. -Simone: And so, long before anyone else did it, Twin Peaks brought a very specific vision of small-town Pacific Northwest to the small screen. With oddball characters… -The Giant: It Is Happening Again. -Simone: …murder… …the Majesty of Nature… – Cooper: I’ve never seen so many trees in my life. -Simone: …brushes with the Supernatural… …references to Nordic and Indigenous heritage… …COFFEE! In short, everything that makes the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Northwest. Bingo! When Stephenie Meyer was researching where to set her vampire romance series, Twilight, she famously Googled which part of the US got the most rainfall, and landed on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State! Here, her vampires could walk around without fear of revealing themselves in the dreadful sun. The Killing, an American adaptation of a Danish detective show, chose Seattle as the best substitute for the original’s remote Swedish setting: -Michael Bolton: We’re shooting Vancouver for Seattle. We have a lot of rain. This is to make us feel that we are in the Pacific Northwest. -Billy Campbell: The rain serves to make everything a bit more claustrophobic. -Simone: Gore Verbinski’s 2002 adaptation of The Ring was also set in Seattle and the surrounding area. INCLUDING MY HOMETOWN!!!! AHHHHHH. It was originally meant to film on the East Coast, but production moved to Seattle because of uh, HUH, 9/11. Not on my bingo card. But once they got there, the mood of the region indelibly influenced the movie. It’s hard to imagine a version of The Ring that isn’t set in Washington, not least because a horse kills itself ON MY HOMETOWN FERRY AHHHHHHHHH— In these shows and movies, the Pacific Northwest is perpetually overcast and dark. Both Twilight and The Ring give Washington state a color correction in post: Twilight’s famous blue tint, and The Ring’s sickly green wash. The Pacific Northwest’s darkness fascinated the creators of Twin Peaks, too: -Sheriff Truman: There’s a sort of evil out there. Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want, a darkness, a presence. It takes many forms, but it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember. -Simone: In Alan Wake 2, the dark forest is an immediate danger. It opens with you — as a waterlogged soon-to-be-corpse on the shores of Washingtons’ Cauldron Lake — shambling through the woods in the rain, AT NIGHT, desperately seeking the safety of human contact — and their flashlights. In another early chapter, Saga and her partner investigate a murder in the forest at sunset. The deeper Saga goes into the forest, the darker it gets — and the more dangerous. The game’s New York city sections are equally dark and terrifying, but these Washington sequences demonstrate some of what can make the Pacific Northwest uniquely unsettling. Visually, it functions as a liminal space: it’s eerie and transitional, often devoid of human life, and vaguely threatening! This liminality sets the tone for many games, and often this liminal terror zone exists, as it does in Twin Peaks, in the woods. Woods themselves can be lovely, dark and deep, but they’re also an effective place for a primordial kind of horror. Author Angela Carter described it in her short story, The Company of Wolves: "You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. … step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you." This fear can be practical: globally, pretty much every culture has some kind of cautionary tale about the forest (probably designed to stop kids from dying in the woods). For the Coast Salish in Washington state, one of those stories is about Slapu, a woman who snatches misbehaving kids up in her basket. The Salish also tell stories about another forest-dweller that you might be more familiar with: Sasquatch. In a Tulalip News article, Upper S’Klallam artist Roger Fernandes describes the dual roles of these beings: “At one level it’s just describing what is … Another level, mythologically, there are powers in the forest we humans will never truly understand, and maybe these beings represent that power.” For white settlers coming into the region, the fear of the forest also becomes fear of The Other. It’s not just that the forest could potentially be dangerous — there’s an element of “not belonging” or “being out of your element” to that fear — not a Pacific Northwest story, but the film The VVitch is a great example of this. The family suffers not just because they’re not equipped to handle the environment, but there’s a threat in it that they could never have expected because they don’t belong here. That’s where the horror comes from in The Forest and Sons of the Forest — survival games set in remote, overgrown woods, where the player is plagued by cannibals. Sons of the Forest is set on an island that’s not explicitly in the Pacific Northwest, but Vancouver-based Endnight Games included so much indigenous flora — like salmonberries and horsetail ferns — that it feels more likely than not. Gorgeous, towering forests are also the setting for Pacific Drive, a recent survival game set in a [CLOWN HONK] up Olympic Peninsula: a true liminal space, constantly shifting and full of deadly anomalies. -Alex Dracott: I’ve always loved the Pacific Northwest as an area, and there’s a lot of just inherent unknowns when you’re driving around in the woods, right. And so, you know, that that was, I think, the core foundation that was like, take a car, put it into a mysterious place. I’m Alex Dracott. I’m the creative director and the studio head for Ironwood Studios. -Simone: Pacific Drive is Ironwood Studios’ first game. In it, the player drives a rickety station wagon through the Olympic Exclusion Zone — an area that’s been walled off after a disastrous experiment in the 1950s. On each mission, the player looks for MacGuffins, while also scavenging parts to keep their car functional. -Alex Dracott: It’s keeping you safe while you’re keeping it running. -Simone: The car is a source of protection and transportation, but also kind of your companion. -Alex Dracott: There is this wonderful mix of beauty and mystery… just, by proxy of the woods and the mountains and the coastline and the weather… it’s obscured! And it can change really quickly. And that mystery means that there’s almost like a second layer to it, right? There’s a… "oh, well, yeah, of course, the trees are pretty and it’s nice. And there’s a good view." But then all of a sudden, it is mysterious, and I’m alone. And you know, that is inherently a discomforting state. -Simone: But Pacific Northwest games don’t just use nature to create unsettling experiences. In Gone Home, college student Katie returns from a study abroad to find her family’s sprawling Oregon home conspicuously empty. It’s the night of a storm, and rain falls steadily as Katie creeps through the house, trying to figure out where the heck her family has gone. Gone Home is not a horror game. But it masquerades as one, and the rain, the darkness, and the eerily empty house are like red herrings to trick the player into thinking that there’s something to be afraid of. The house, like the woods, is a liminal space: eerie, abandoned, surreal, and in a state of transition: Katie’s family is about to change forever based on what she learns in the house. But we don’t see any of that — Gone Home players are poised on the edge of something about to happen. Gone Home is yet another Pacific Northwest game where being alone and isolated can be scary. But what if: people were also scary! One of the fun facts I remember from growing up is that Washington has more serial killers than any other US state. Which is completely untrue! It was just one of those urban legends that got passed around the playground as soon as kids were old enough to start learning about Ted Bundy, or the Green River Killer — two certified Washingtonians, to be sure. That sucks. But definitely outliers. But murder and serial killers are indelibly linked to the Pacific Northwest. Twin Peaks centers around a murder mystery whose central question — who killed Laura Palmer? — went viral before going viral was a thing. Twin Peaks also took a popular TV staple — an oddball cast of characters — to a new high. TV shows, especially sitcoms, thrive on quirkiness, but not every show has… a Log Lady. These are characters whose weirdness feeds into the texture of the world — and it’s not necessarily played for laughs, like in your typical sitcom. Takashi Tezuka, the director of Link’s Awakening, was inspired by Twin Peaks’ “suspicious types” when he populated his own fictional world. Remedy pays homage to Twin Peaks with Alan Wake’s blend of murder mystery and oddballs: -Koskela: We’re going to a cool guy’s house… to drink some brewskies! -Simone: It contributes to the feeling that things here are just off. When supernatural stuff starts happening — well, of course it did! No one here is normal! But no game does this more than Hidetaka Suehiro’s Deadly Premonition. It’s a survival horror game that basically plays as a parody of, and tribute to, Twin Peaks — from the mystery plot where an FBI agent solves murders in a small Washington town, to the emphasis on coffee, to the diner, to the Red Room, to the Pot Lady — all Twin Peaks’ weirdness, turned up to 11. -Francis York Morgan: FK … in… the coffee! -Simone: In real life though, the Pacific Northwest is not just populated by weirdos and murderers. And unfortunately neither games nor other mainstream media have made much effort to explore the region’s indigenous identities, which is a huge oversight. Indigenous art, however, is often used as a shorthand to let viewers know that they’re in the Pacific Northwest. -Stephen Groening: You know, Pacific Northwest indigenous art… you see that in the background of anything, you sort of know where you are. -Simone: It’s frustrating when shows do this without really depicting the people who made that art, but using native art for the aesthetic is genuinely common in the region. The Seattle Seahawks’ logo, one of the few Native American-inspired football brands that’s NOT problematic, is based on designs from the 1965 book Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. On the video game front, Infamous: Second Son moves the series’ action to Seattle, and makes protagonist Delsin Rowe a member of the fictional Akomish tribe — clearly inspired by Washington groups like the Duwamish or the Suquamish… but not. The execution of Delsin’s story, and the decision to create a fictional tribe for him, has been decidedly mixed. But developer Sucker Punch’s decision to make him Native American grew out of the Washington setting. But there is another ethnicity that’s prominently featured in Pacific Northwest media. -Stephen Groening: There’s large Norwegian populations, there’s large Scandinavian populations. …And when I watch like Nordic television, you know, Norwegian shows, Swedish shows, I’m like, this feels very similar to the way that the Pacific Northwest is portrayed, they’re a little bit quirky, they’re a little bit reserved, until like, you get them drunk. And then suddenly, you know, like, everything’s on the table. -Simone: According to Visit Seattle, Scandinavians became the area’s largest ethnic group in 1910, after waves of 18th century immigration from one cold, dark place to another! These European immigrants found work in Washington’s industries of logging and milling, fishing, boat-building, canning — The Nordic influence is credited with causing the “Seattle Freeze,” a reserved but polite attitude that Seattlites have towards new people. It’s our version of Minnesota Nice! Now, Twin Peaks obviously didn’t invent Nordic migration to Seattle, but it’s yet another box the show checks off in Pacific Northwest Bingo. -Cooper (over rowdy singing): What’s with the choir practice? -Waitress (laughing): Business junket, from Iceland. Got in about 3 this morning. (Coop sighs) -Simone: This Nordic influence is all over TV and games. Finnish developer Remedy fills Alan Wake 2 with Finnish influences that fit right into Washington state. The developers were openly inspired by Twin Peaks, but a lot of what makes Twin Peaks special overlaps with what Remedy describes as its Finnish sensibilities: -Marko Muikku: It was, first of all, proving that we can do bigger games in Finland. There is a Finnish flavor in it that you cannot really put your finger on it. -Ansi Määttä: We are kind of cherishing our culture and what we are known for: our quirky little things and manners. -Simone: And in What Remains of Edith Finch, one of my favorite Washington games, the patriarch of the namesake cursed Finch family emigrated to the United States from Norway in the 1930s. In an early design doc for the game, the developers outlined why the Pacific Northwest setting was important: This isn’t a generic foggy place, this is Washington…. We chose the Northwest because it has strong associations with unspoiled natural spaces, isolation, and oddball characters, which are all important elements for our game. … It goes on to list both The Ring and Twin Peaks as sources of inspiration. The final element that I want to talk about is the influence of the supernatural on Pacific Northwest media. And I don’t just mean the CW show that filmed in Vancouver for decades. Twin Peaks set the stage here too: it starts to become clear that there’s a supernatural force at work in the town. This wasn’t hugely popular with viewers at the time. But frankly, watching the show with 34 years of distance, I love how it all fits together. It’s really easy to read Twin Peaks as a sort of modern fairy story, where the unwitting townsfolk are constantly brushing up against strange beings that exist beyond their understanding. The supernatural is now a common facet of Pacific Northwest stories — due to a combo of Twin Peaks’ influence, but also the way the dang place looks. -Alex Dracott: I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. And I, you know, I’ve artistically I’ve always been fascinated with this juxtaposition between like nature and manmade structures, especially if there are overgrown ruins and all these things and … I drive out to old abandoned towns and tunnels, and I will go and, like, take photos there. And I’ll use that for inspiration for my artwork. -Simone: In Oxenfree, a group of teens take a FERRY (!!!) to a fictional Oregon island, where they encounter ghosts in the radio waves on a creepy abandoned military fort — much like the ones I grew up playing in. Like a lot of border areas, the Pacific Northwest is pretty militarized — with functioning naval bases like Bremerton, but also abandoned structures like the ones in Port Townsend. But this concept of “ghost towns” is prevalent all up and down the coast, thanks to the boom-and-bust cycle of colonization. There are abandoned mining and logging towns, and also towns created to house railroad workers that simply… wasted away. Many are, of course, rumored to be haunted, and when you combine that with the region’s natural qualities… you get a certified Aesthetic. In an interview with the Seattle Times, Oxenfree’s studio director Sean Krankel talked about the setting: My wife and I took a trip to Portland, and it just blew me away because that sort of ambience and vibe of the trees and the fog and the water and the temperature and the mist — it’s a real character in and of itself. Krankel and Wife aren’t alone. Life is Strange I be is — about a MAGICAL teen girl in a SMALL OREGON TOWN solving a MURDER. And its French creators were inspired by both American TV like Buffy and Twin Peaks, but also a timely visit to the Pacific Northwest: We just fell in love with the almost mystical feeling of the woods and the Pacific Ocean in this part of the US … and that’s when we knew then that we wanted our story to take place in a small town in this region. Video games capture a view of the Pacific Northwest that’s been codified since Twin Peaks took TV by storm in the 90s. But the modern Pacific Northwest has a very different reputation. -Stephen Groening: Now, even in the 10 years that I’ve been here, you know, downtown South Lake Union has changed so much. It’s very much steel and glass. There’s an enormous amount of money here. …Everybody is an engineer of one sort or another. And I think that the reputation has changed, because so many people are moving here because of the jobs because there’s nice high paying jobs. So the cost of living is also enormous. So I think of film, you know, like Soderbergh’s Kimi sort of captures that new Seattle really well. -Simone: Kimi is a techno-thriller where a hacker tries to outsmart an overreaching, evil tech corporation. -Stephen Groening: That’s very different, I think, from The X-Files or Twin Peaks, where there’s a lot of tactility and a lot of person-to-person interaction… So, I would say that our reputation now is much more Amazon, the Oculus Rift, AI, VR, Microsoft — very much a tech town. Silicon Valley, but pretty. …I don’t like it, because we’re no longer distinctive in any way. Right? … the distinct character is being lost in favor of this sort of digital tech culture. -Simone: It’s sad but it’s kind of true – a lot of what makes the Pacific Northwest special is still there, but the big cities have changed astronomically from when I was a kid. Sure, companies like Microsoft and Amazon might bring in high-paying jobs, but they also explode housing costs, and create campuses that make it easy for tech workers to avoid engaging with the city around them. Wow who left this soapbox here — Anyway, the answer to how the Pacific Northwest got weird is baked into the history of the area, but was forever cemented in our minds through the popularity of Twin Peaks, and its magical, murdery, well-caffeinated cast of oddballs… OHH BINGO, I GOT A BINGO!. [PORTLANDIA SONG WITH THE WORD PORTLAND REPLACE BY “SEATTLE”]