Wisconsin is a burgeoning hotbed for video games devs, but the state rarely appears as an in-game location.

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For the past few months, I have been playing the Remedy video game Control. After I picked it up during a Steam seasonal sale last year, it had drifted along my backlog, untouched. But then, a number of my friends—including Tone Madison publisher Scott Gordon—began playing the game almost simultaneously. An odd occurrence for a game that’s now five years old. Perhaps they were motivated by news of an impending sequel. Or they may have been inspired to return to the world of Control by 2023’s Alan Wake 2, given that those titles are connected by a shared universe. Maybe it was the news of a forthcoming adaptation. In any case, seeing it pop up constantly was as good a reminder as any to finally give it a whirl.

I am nearly done with Control and am largely focused on wrapping up its various side quests. In traversing the game’s core setting—the blighted, shape-shifting headquarters of a US government agency that has meddled disastrously with paranormal forces—players will undoubtedly come across a huge United States map. On that particular map (which is in one of Control‘s many enormous, occasionally-shifting rooms), the state capitals are all clearly marked, Madison included. An odd, small thrill can typically be gleaned from seeing your home represented in media, whether that’s music, film, a beloved TV series, or video games. But seeing Madison on that map led me to wonder: are there any video games that are actually set in Wisconsin?

The answer wasn’t as straightforward as I’d expected.

Right around the time I started searching in earnest, YouTuber Skylerbuns uploaded a video essay titled “I Visited Every U.S. State (In Video Games).” Over the course of a two-hour video essay, Skylerbuns painstakingly details a process of locating and playing a video game for each state. Wisconsin effectively turns up dry, with a few slight caveats. In the video, the pick is ultimately 2014’s The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter. A first-person investigative horror-mystery point-and-click walking simulator adventure. The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter has been praised many times over for its atmosphere and aesthetics, with some singling out the environment.

But that’s where one of the caveats about that Wisconsin connection kicks in: not only is “Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin” a fictional location, the environmental details are recreations of places in the game developers’ home country, Poland. And while there is a healthy Polish contingency baked into Wisconsin, that doesn’t exactly count as Wisconsin. The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter is also loosely inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” which is set in Owl Creek, Alabama. The game’s location is truly all over the map, and only really Wisconsin in name.

Oddly, the game still somehow manages to make it feel like you’re traversing Wisconsin (or perhaps Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) in autumn. At least in its opening section. There’s a rustic tranquility that should be familiar to anyone who’s taken a long fall walk by a reasonably-sized body of water along one of the many lakes or bays that populate Wisconsin. Granted, this sensation of being somewhere familiar gets subverted and thrown off when the game begins incorporating supernatural elements, but that’s by design. As the narrative and environment expand, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter feels decidedly less like the dairy state, and much more like a truly fictional setting. The game is worth playing, despite being a bit of a red herring in a search to “find” a digital Wisconsin.

In the “Every U.S. State” video essay, Skylerbuns acknowledges that not a lot of games take place in Wisconsin, and further inspection really underscores that truth. Most of Wisconsin’s video game representation over the past decade comes via driving simulators and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 (which features the Blackwolf Run Golf Course in Kohler). There is also a halfway reasonable case to be made that games featuring the Packers, Brewers, Bucks, and Badgers (and their respective stadiums) are at least partially set here as well, though that feels like a technicality.

But there have been presentations of the state in recent video games. Devolver Bootleg‘s Hotline Milwaukee mini-game creates a notch in the tally for Wisconsin-set video games that are true oddballs. But for the most part, any video game set in Wisconsin is either extremely independent, primarily educational, or for classic and/or outdated systems that rarely get ported to modern consoles (Act Of War: High Treason and its Fort McCoy level is a notable exception).

One recent Wisconsin-set game that did recently get ported to a modern console comes by way of Space Raft guitarist/vocalist Jordan Davis. Originally created for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System in 2020, Davis’ Space Raft: The Video Game was made available on Nintendo Switch in mid-August. In early September, the game came to Steam. Space Raft features one of the most most spiritually and historically honest depictions of a Wisconsin city—in this case, Milwaukee—that has appeared in a video game to date. [Full disclosure: one of my bandmates and close friends appears as a non-playable character in the game.] Cactus Club, High Dive, and Rushmor Records all appear within the game, as do our friends over at Milwaukee Record. That level of specificity—and clear affection—buoy the game’s appeal.

Davis has kept busy as a games dev, and has not completely moved away from featuring Wisconsin in his work. The Storied Sword is Davis’ latest release for the NES, though its setting is intentionally fictitious. But earlier this year, Davis revealed in a Facebook post that he was focusing his efforts on making a simulator for the proudly eccentric Green Bay UFO Museum Gift Shop And Records. Davis describes the NES game as being “about a record-loving alien that gets hired by [the employee and owner tandem of] Tom [Smith] and Pierre [Jacque] to protect the shop from record-eating aliens while they break for lunch.” Not much else is currently known about the game, but it does come with the promise of extending the throughline of preserving a very specific time and region of Wisconsin’s punk-leaning culture. Whether the game gets fully completed and follows a similar trajectory to Space Raft remains to be seen.

Even with Davis doing commendable and invaluable work, most of it is specifically designed to emulate a bygone era of gaming. It’s a bit odd that Wisconsin in video-gaming seems to be so married to a past era when its capital city has become an unlikely hub for video game creatives who are constantly pushing the medium forward. It’s stranger still that Madison doesn’t really appear in the worlds of video games, especially when so many people in Madison are responsible for their creation and/or augmentation. For all of the connections, the city seems like it should have a bit more representation than College Football 2025‘s “Jump Around”-less recreation of Camp Randall.

Looking back at the slate of games I haven’t touched on, I notice a genuine sense of disparity among the extremely limited selections. Really, the only thing uniting Wisconsin-set (or partially-set) games like Monster House, Nancy Drew: Treasure In The Royal Tower, Silent Scope, Cabela’s Trophy Bucks, and several of the Rampage titles is that they all came out more than 16 years ago. Wisconsin deserves an update, outside of the endless sports franchise iterations of places like Camp Randall, Lambeau Field, American Family Field, and Fiserv Forum. The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter, despite all the caveats that come with it, points to a potentially fertile ground for the state as a setting for horror-mystery fare.

Maybe it’s just the season talking, but in putting this piece together, I could not stop turning over ideas for horror-mystery games set in Wisconsin. Maybe someone out there carves out the necessary time and agreements to make a stealth-horror game in which a protagonist gets locked into The House On The Rock overnight. Maybe they have to navigate through its intricate map and web of possibly alive(?) paraphernalia to either make it to the possibly safe(?) Japanese garden or survive till morning. Maybe there’s a game out there waiting to be made about a protagonist who realizes their idyllic Northwoods cabin getaway has taken a left turn. Maybe they have to flip the script on yet another Wisconsin serial killer by identifying them, covertly tracking their movements, and doing whatever they need to do in order to escape. And maybe there’s a game in which a player’s Madison farm is being repeatedly ransacked by unknown forces and the player needs to work to uncover the supernatural(?) or super-logical cause.

There are a lot of ideas for games and a lot of ideas for ways those games could go, but one thing remains clear: Wisconsin needs better in-game representation. Jordan Davis shouldn’t be doing the bulk of the heavy lifting on his own. This October, it may be worth taking a step back—even as just a thought exercise—and contemplating what type of Wisconsin game you’d most like to see in the world. If you’re a dev that’s reading this, and you have the tools to get that done, consider making it a reality. If you do, let me know (I am always reachable at steven@tonemadison.com). I’d very much like to play whatever it is you create.