Kentucky is a slice of the US famous for fried chicken, horses, tobacco, bluegrass music, and southern cuisine. Video games seldom get linked with the state. Yet, here are six high-profile games that spotlight it.
GoldenEye: Rogue Agent
Released in 2004 for the PS2, Xbox, Nintendo DS, and GameCube, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent is an EA Games creation in the first-person shooter genre. It is an entry in Electronic Arts’ James Bond franchise and a sequel to the 1997 game that carried the name of the seventeenth film in the James Bond Series, Golden Eye. In Rogue Agent, players take on the role of a one-eyed, unnamed ex-MI6 agent who goes up against the infamous Dr. No.
Before getting pitted against this legendary villain, the agent in question gets evaluated via a simulation where he attacks the United States Army installation in Kentucky’s Fort Knox, a complex that stores half the country’s gold reserves. Though this game received mixed reviews from critics, Electronic Arts claimed it sold over a million units globally in the first few months following its debut, and it was a sizeable commercial success overall.
007 Legends
Ian Fleming’s fictional superhero-like secret agent appears again on this list in another James Bond game where Kentucky gets featured in a virtual form. Yet, this one is not an Electronic Arts title but one developed by Eurocom and published by Activision. Operating on an engine used in 2011’s GoldenEye 007: Reloaded, this title, like Rouge Agent, also utilizes Fort Knox in its plotline. However, instead of playing as some nameless MI6 agent, players assume the role of Bond himself, a version boasting the likeness of Daniel Craig.
Activision reloaded the GoldenEye series in 2010, the same year it set loose James Bond 007: Blood Stone. 007 Legends hit store shelves in 2012, and it got generally unfavorable reviews, with many critics nocking the game’s awful stealth gameplay.
Kentucky Route Zero
Here, we have a Cardboard Computer’s interactive point-and-click adventure published by Annapurna Interactive. That is the same company responsible for sending to market titles like Neon White, Outer Wilds, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Stray. Developed for macOS, Windows, and Linux, Kentucky Route Zero tells the story of Conway, a truck driver who meets various peculiar people on Kentucky’s mysterious Route Zero. He travels this road to deliver one final item for the antiques business that he works for.
The gameplay in Kentucky Route Zero is virtually all point-and-click, with the story getting told via text dialogue. Primarily hailed for its engaging narrative, this game has rightfully earned its status as a cult classic, and aside from PC, it is also available for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox X/S, Android/iOS smartphones, and Nintendo Switch. The story in Kentucky Route Zero is separated into five acts, and its 3D art has been developed using the Unity game engine.
Derby Dollars
The Kentucky Derby is, without question, the most famous horse race in the world. Ran on the Churchill Downs track in Louisville, the Derby has a tradition dating back almost a century and a half, representing the first leg of the US Triple Crown. Debry Dollars is a reel-spinning game created by RealTime Gaming. It is a title that does not outright mention Kentucky, but it is pretty clear that it bids homage to the state’s world-renowned horse race.
The reason to play this slot at online casinos in Kentucky is that it implements a low variance math model and a high return-to-player setting of 97.5%, a rarely seen player-friendly spec combo.
Project Zomboid
Zombies have been around since the 1960s when George Romero conceived a form of the undead, which we now recognize as zombies, even though reanimated corpses have been around way before this decade in Haitian folklore. The AMC hit show Walking Dead brought zombies into the limelight again in the early 2010s. As the zombie trend was heating up at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, independent developer The Indie Stone began work on Project Zomboid, which initially became a tech demo in April 2011. Nevertheless, it received 2013 Early Access on Steam, and a few months later, its multiplayer version became publicly available.
In Project Zomboid, players find themselves in Kentucky’s city of Louisville, referred to as Knox Country here, an area of the Bluegrass State quarantined by the government due to a zombie outbreak. It should be noted that the story here unfolds in 1993. And, over the past decade, this Indie Stone survival RPG, on hand for PC play only, has undergone multiple updates, new builds, and a revamped multiplayer mode.
The X-Files: Deep State
Anyone who watched TV in the 1990s knows that The X Files is one of several TV shows that defined the nineties, redefining sci-fi mystery writing for mass consumption. The events in this game happen between the tenth and ninth seasons of the series, and the second case in this title, named Corpore Sano, has Deep State’s main characters, Winter and Dale, land in Lexington, Kentucky, examining a series of mysterious deaths that have occurred there.
While this puzzle mobile game that Creative Mobile unleashed worldwide in 2018 remains faithful to its source material, it was widely criticized for its pricing strategy and freemium nature. Hence, it divided mobile gamers, snagging an average Metacritic review rating.