From Cave City’s Dinosaur World and the Forest Giants of Shepherdsville to the giant Fork in the Road in Franklin, a free game developed by Kentucky Tourism gives people the chance to explore some of the Bluegrass State’s more off-the-beaten-path attractions.
The Great Big Kentucky Adventure – released in May – lets players side scroll through a dozen different Kentucky cities and their attractions.
With classic-sounding chiptune theme music and an old school pixel art style, it plays similarly to a classic Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis game. Players can defeat monsters, jump over obstacles, collect coins or cookies and explore Kentucky.
South Carolina-based designer and illustrator Justin Gammon created the art and design for the game. He said lending this kind of aesthetic to environments that exist in the real world could help to put these places in a fresh perspective for tourists and residents.
“There are things that are happening in your state or in the area that you don’t realize, or maybe you’re accustomed to … and when it’s all given this new context, solely to kids, it kind of opens up their eyes to what’s out there and can actually interact with and visit,” Gammon said. “I think that was the plan for the entire time: [to] sneak this game into a kid’s face and trick them into actually visiting the real place.”
Leveling up
A family of giants lives in the western Kentucky woods near Muhlenberg County’s Lake Malone.
The six statues that make up the Big Twigs Family – some of which stand as tall as 17 feet – have been the subject of a local tourism campaign, a children’s book and now the Great Big Kentucky Adventure game.
Misty Stanley leads the Muhlenberg County Tourism Commission. She said that it made sense for Muhlenberg to join this project.
“I feel like this game is just another part of getting our Big Twigs out there and getting people two-three-four hours aways to want to make a visit to Muhlenberg County,” said Stanley.
Stanley said that she hopes the statues at Lake Malone State Park can draw in visitors that play the game as they have in real life. The local tourism authority said visits have risen by more than 20% monthly since they were installed in 2021 and 2022.
Gammon said one of his favorite levels to design was the one featuring downtown Paducah and its floodwall murals, which show scenes from the town and region’s history.
“In Kentucky, there are a lot of these lesser known attractions, such as our wall-to-wall flood wall murals, but might not be the first thing people think of when they think of Paducah,” said Liza Hammonds, the director of marketing and communications for the Paducah Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Hammonds praised the game’s depiction of downtown Paducah, especially Gammon’s recreations of some of the dozens of murals on the western Kentucky town’s riverfront.
“All those paintings are real. So you can go to the flood wall, here on the river in Paducah, and see that floodwall just as it’s depicted in the game,” Hammonds said. “I will say there are no real monsters here though.”
The game also features levels dedicated to Kentucky landmarks in Frankfort, Grant County, Henderson, Hopkinsville, Louisville, Madisonville and Munfordville.
Gammon said he designed the game to be simple and approachable for kids of all ages – even including a few Easter eggs for savvy Bluegrass State residents in the form of a pair of playable characters.
Hopkinsville recently christened itself the Batter Capital of the World in 2022, touting its history of producing wheat-based products at Continental Mills, Siemer Milling Company and the Hopkinsville Milling Company.
“So you’ve got Jack, who’s like a flapjack pancake character. He’s attributed to (Hopkinsville),” said Gammon. “And then you’ve got Allen who’s the alien. He’s not only that. He’s basically a tourist of the entire planet, so he’s there as an outsider of the entire world just trying to explore these locations.”
The character of Allen, Gammon said, is inspired by an odd bit of Hopkinsville history. The western Kentucky town was the supposed site of an infamous alien encounter during the 1950s.
Team Kentucky collaborated with the ad agency Coomer and Kentucky Convention and Visitors Bureaus (CVB) to make this video game come to life.
Amy Rogers heads up the Hopkinsville-Christian County Convention & Visitors Bureau and also helped to steer the project of the game’s development, which took around seven months. She credits Coomer – the ad agency that Team Kentucky partnered with – for the quality of the game.
“We did not really know what they were going to come to the table with, and that was the beauty of it because that’s what they do, they are content creators,” said Rogers. “[Kids] can engage and they’re also going to learn because they’re able to see these big, larger than life items that are all over [the state],” Rogers said. “This is just going to help with their learning because it’s gonna be like, ‘Hey, Mom, Dad, I want to go explore this.’ It’s kind of a win-win.”
The Great Big Kentucky Adventure is available for free on desktop, iOS or Android devices.
This story is republished with permission from WKMS. Read the original.
Zoe Lewis is a first-year sophomore at Murray State University from Benton, Kentucky. She is majoring in journalism with a minor in media production. She enjoys reading, going to movie theaters, spending time with her family and friends, and eating good food. Zoe is an Alpha Omicron Pi sorority member in the Delta Omega chapter. She is very excited to start working at WKMS and work while learning more about NPR, reporting, journalism, and broadcasting.
