Valve Software co-founder Gabe Newell, DoubleDown Interactive CEO Greg Enell, ZipLine Games co-founder Todd Hooper and many others from Seattle’s burgeoning gaming business appear in a new special report from Northwest Cable News called Generation Gamer that explores in detail the impact of the video game industry.

“I think now it is becoming incredibly obvious that gaming is 70-year-old people who are playing games with their kids, and moms and dads and four-year-olds playing on their parents’ iPods,” said Sucker Punch co-founder Brian Fleming.

Later in the series, PopCap’s Jeff Green makes comparisons to the grunge rock scene of the 1990s. “It is kind of like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and all of those (bands) in the 90s. Now we’ve got PopCap … and Valve and all of these other kind of amazing indie studios, and all of these people in their 20s who are like super tuned to geek culture.”

The Seattle gaming industry is pretty impressive, and just last week on the GeekWire podcast PopCap Games co-founder John Vechey talked in detail about the strength of the industry here. “I think it is one of the best places to have a gaming company,” said Vechey, adding that there’s a “creative atmosphere in Seattle” that just doesn’t exist in Silicon Valley.

Here’s the first installment of NWCN’s special report:


In part two of the series, NWCN takes a look at how gaming companies are giving back and how the theories behind video games are helping expand research in other fields. In part three, NWCN takes a look at the video game “renaissance” and looks at how small innovative studios are pushing the envelope into new areas.

The series also has  12 video extras with Z2Live’s David Bluhm, Valve’s Gabe Newell, GameHouse president Matt Hulett and others.

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