Always Green

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.

France is the second-biggest producer of video games in the world. Franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Dishonored, Life is Strange, and … whatever the hell David Cage is doing, come from French-based companies. So France has had a huge influence on gaming, globally. But what you might not know is how weird and counter-cultural some of France’s early games are! In the 1980s, French game developers were going wild, making games that would fit right in on itch.io today.