Happy Monday, folks. I’m Wolfman Jew, here to make sure that our twice a week gaming discourse goes by smoothly and softly.

However, it would be remiss of me to not discuss the passing of David Lynch. The site as a whole has been mourning since Thursday, and while I’ve spent many years evangelizing his work—I believe I even wrote the site’s first director profile on him, though it was only on the original site and is fully scrubbed from the internet—I fear I might be coming in too late. That being said, Lynch is important for video game history and discourse, because his work was incredibly influential in ways that are hard to adequately express.

Though he has plenty of iconic films to his name, this is primarily if not exclusively due to the overwhelming success and cultural penetration of Twin Peaks, within Japanese culture especially. The show was epochal and culturally significant for its medium, but it was also airing during some of gaming’s formative years, when storytelling was becoming more consistently explored. Because of this, the show’s DNA wound up in all sorts of games and has stayed for decades. The Legend of Zelda got its iconic, eccentric character writing from the show, something that’s been there from Link’s Awakening to Echoes of Wisdom. Kentucky Route Zero looked at its sorrow, community, and off kilter live music. Silent Hill doesn’t exist in its classic form without the show; neither does Alan Wake and, frankly, Remedy as a whole. Even ignoring outright pastiches or ripoffs like Deadly Premonition or the rather beautiful Virginia, references to it and Lynch’s broader canon can be found everywhere. From Life is Strange to EarthBound to Persona to Goro Majima’s Wild at Heart-inspired jacket, flickers and shadows of David Lynch exists across the games industry. Through no choice or involvement of his own, he is as important to this medium as any other artist.

If the preceding paragraphs are any indication, I have a deep, deep love of Lynch, from Eraserhead to Mulholland Dr to even his utterly incoherent Dune adaptation. His work means a great deal to me. This one hurts, more than any other artist’s death. But this isn’t about me, and it’s not just about Lynch on his own but Lynch as a lodestar for gaming culture. A trope that is strange, bewildering, and beautiful. Which is why I think this is a prompt that has to be done at the soonest possible opportunity: many if not all of us have played games actively or passively inspired by David Lynch’s work. If you’ve got the time and inclination, talk about them. You can talk about the surprising references, the reused plot points, the imagery, the tone, how they measure up to the movies… the thing is, many of these games took very different approaches to this. And I suppose that fits. “Eclectic.”

I recognize that this is a somewhat atypical prompt, perhaps even for me. I also realize that this is for many of us a very cruel day that may not inspire existential or artistic musings about video games. If you’d just like to talk about the stuff you played over the weekend, be my guest.

Please take care of yourselves.