How ‘Twin Peaks’ influenced video game culture
The TV industry has long been shaped by pioneering programming, with shows like Steven Spielberg’s HBO mini-series Band of Brothers and Ron Howard’s work on Arrested Development heralding new kinds of contemporary content. Yet, one of the most influential pieces of media from the 20th century was another series from a master filmmaker, Twin Peaks.
Co-created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, Twin Peaks was one of the most peculiar TV phenomena of the 1990s and still to this day remains something of an utter oddity. Certainly one of the most popular experimental TV dramas of all time, the show is set in the hills of the fictional Twin Peaks, where the murder of young Laura Palmer sets FBI agent Special Agent Dale Cooper down a rabbit hole of surrealism and psychedelia.
While most projects of this kind push the majority of viewers away while retaining a strong cult fanbase, Twin Peaks ended up embroiling the whole of pop culture throughout the 1990s, with the question of ‘Who Killed Laura Palmer?’ torturing sofa-lying detectives. Hugely popular in Western society as well as in Japan, Twin Peaks changed how contemporary television was consumed, encouraging the creation of more eccentric shows that meddled with genre.
The fantastical police procedural can be seen in the beloved sci-fi series X-Files, while the surrealism of Lost, no doubt, took a leaf out of Lynch’s playbook, but perhaps the most fascinating area Twin Peaks proved to be influential is in the world of video games.
A curious world of deep, exploratory mystery, Lynch’s Twin Peaks setting already feels like a digitally-created metaverse, with a video game adaptation where you play as Dale Cooper traversing dreams and reality to solve the central crime feeling like a tangible concept. Others clearly got the same idea from the show, too, with the bizarre survival game Deadly Premonition from 2010 feeling as if it exists in the very same universe.
Sharing a similar dedication to surrealism, the game tells the story of FBI Agent Francis York Morgan trying to solve a murder in small-town America while trying to understand the bizarre occurrences going on around him. Almost identical in tone, the game has long been compared to Twin Peaks, with several aspects, such as the protagonist’s love of good coffee and the countless eccentric characters, being direct references.
Encouraging game creators to explore the inner madness of their protagonist’s mind and traverse surrealism as if it were a physical space, Twin Peaks has also made way for the horror games The Evil Within and Alan Wake, as well as the adventure series Life is Strange and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.
Thanks to the sheer breadth of Twin Peaks’ genre influences, everything from horror to detective tales to niche indie flicks takes influence from its ingenuity, with such being an ode to the timelessness of Lynch’s existential tale.
