Kentucky Route Zero is celebrating its five-year anniversary today, January 28, 2025. Below, we look back at its inspirations and excitement for experimentation.

It is in the details that Kentucky Route Zero stakes its claim beyond video games. Its typewriter typography. The terse descriptions of characters between bursts of dialogue. The adventure game actions written like stage directions. Lights that illuminate the new parts of a stage or set. It is the details that matter. In practice, KRZ doesn’t play differently from any other adventure game, but it feels different than many of them. This is because it takes from a wide array of influences, many beyond the usual preview of video games. Its interest in theater, film, visual art, and radio is what still makes it a vivid game five years later.

It is no secret that video games can be a little self-obsessed. While one could meaningfully label a painting, a movie, or a book as “science-fiction” or “romantic,” video game genre designations like “roguelike” or “platformer” can only really describe video games (though if any one wants write an essay about what novels could be described as “strategy” or “simulation,” I would be very eager to read it). Many–even most–big-budget games borrow from a ready-made list of influences, such as Star Wars, Alien, Indiana Jones, or Lord of the Rings. This narrow set of sources can make video games feel sometimes hyper-generic: unable to node themselves into a meaningful network, but instead digging deeper into an ever-drying well. When a big game attempts a big homage to genuine artistic legacy, it can feel absurd. Who could possibly take Ghost of Tsushima’s “Kurosawa mode” seriously?

Though Kentucky Route Zero could be described as science-fiction, it is a quiet unnerving kind, drawing most obviously from the magical realism of writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Ricardo Piglia. It has stark artificiality, a stageness, that is clearly pulling on the theoretical and fictional work of Bertolt Brecht. It is, in a word, pretty far outside the regular span of video games. This results in something that can feel beguiling and strange in a way video games can often struggle to be, especially if you haven’t read any of its inspirations.

This is not to say that KRZ is ashamed of or above its adventure-games roots. It also stakes its claim within video games, sometimes in grand overt gestures. Within the first screen of KRZ you will encounter a computer console where you can request “games.” It will reply “games is not real.” In Act 3, you interface with a gigantic machine which plays a version of Colossal Cave Adventure. It is, undoubtedly, pretentious. But it also puts video game influences alongside the literary and theatrical without a lot of fuss. Of course these things belong together. Why wouldn’t they? That matter-of-factness grants KRZ a lot of ground to explore its own formal qualities.

Of course, it is important that we not give into astonishment. Plenty of games take inspiration from outside of video games (or even just outside of video games’ regular set of influences) and they are still tiresome. BioShock Infinite is perhaps the most grandiose and spectacular example of this. There are also plenty of great games which also pull beyond the medium’s clichés. Disco Elysium and Signalis made big splashes for similar reasons. Norco was unfairly compared to Kentucky Route Zero for drawing on a different set of Americana. People can be hyperbolic about KRZ, naming it as one of the most important games of all time merely for having book smarts and pro-labor politics. It’s easy and tempting to exaggerate a video game’s originality or power, especially when we haven’t read or watched or looked at the things it is drawing from.

But what KRZ has, that many other games don’t, is a real excitement and verve for experimentation. It is not merely that it borrows from other works of art, but that it wants to innovate on its own terms. Each of its five acts are, to some degree, daring formal exercises. From the whirring wheels and road maps of Act I to the Huckleberryian ferry ride of Act IV, the game never settles on a consistent visual language or conceit. The game took so long to make, the full game released nine years after it first appeared on a Kickstarter campaign. This is perhaps explained by how eager it is to reinvent itself.

Every act, released individually, does feel like something new. Main characters vanish never to appear again and the player’s control and perspective alter constantly. The culmination of this is, of course, Act V, where the player plays a cat wandering a small town. The camera turns on a swivel placed in the center of town. The center of the camera is on the spoke of the wheel or the trunk of a tree, the heart on which this whole community turns. In its final moments, the game takes on a communal character, not following any individual really, but instead a place: a people.

If you search the right phrase, you’ll find dozens of forum posts asking for movies, books, and TV shows like KRZ. The question is sort of funny on its face. What makes KRZ strange and exciting in video games is far more commonplace in essentially every other medium. It is easy, and understandable, to denigrate KRZ’s contributions for this reason. Could I not just read Gabriel García Márquez, Berholt Brecht, and John Steinbeck and call it a day? But what this fosters in me is a sense of indebtedness. Self-evidently, great art steals, but that theft is not one of ownership. It’s more like a torrent. Every other copy still exists; many of them have their pieces in yours. It’s a network. Any theft pulls a string, tying the knot further. KRZ’s final image is of a house without walls–a place that lets you in–where new friends pull up a chair for you, and lend you a book. Kentucky Route Zero is a powerful work of art, because it is an invitation. Many games are eager to bring you into their world, to make it consume you. KRZ wants nothing more than to push you into something else, to make you see the world that came before it.