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troperville

Brutal Legend, oh so hard. Ozzy Osbourne, Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and Rob Halford show up in the game, are IDENTICAL to their real-life appearance, and they're not recognized as such by metal uberfan Eddie Riggs.
A bonus cutscene in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, from The Verse's bizarre television, shows the actress Lee Meriwether (rather creepily) interviewing the screenwriter David Hayter — Meriwether and Dayter being the voice actors for Big Mama and Solid Snake respectively. In case we didn't get it, Dayter is dressed in a snakeskin jacket and digital eyepatch, and Meriwether talks to him in the somewhat stilted, poetic, dramatic tones of a Metal Gear character giving an important speech, only addressing him by his full name. Did we mention the Metal Gear Solid has No Fourth Wall?
- More subtly, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater mentions many movies which served as an inspiration for the game, and the first Metal Gear Solid ends (if you submit to the torture) with Snake openly discussing his Theme Naming with his new friend, Otacon (they're called Dave and Hal).
- Hideo Kojima exists within the Metal Gear universe, as a 'legendary game developer', and Otacon is shown to be a fan of his other games Policenauts, Zone Of The Enders, and Boktai. But Otacon, despite knowing Meryl and implicitly being friends with her, doesn't recognise Meryl Silverburgh as being an Expy of a character in Policenauts. He also doesn't notice anything strange about the Solar Gun, or the HIDE-CHAN noodles. The weirdness of this is massively dwarfed by the fact that Emma has a Metal Gear Ghost Babel poster in her lab in Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons Of Liberty, with Snake on it. Ghost Babel also had Raiden in it, as well as the Show Within a Show IdeaSpy 2.5, which Snake and Otacon are fans of in Metal Gear Solid 4 and which was turned into a Radio Drama voice acted by Hideo Kojima and Yumi Kikuchi in the real world. If Snake recognises the resemblance between Yumi Kikuchi and Raging Beauty, he doesn't comment on it.
  - It's possible Emma's poster isn't an example; after Metal Gear Solid, an account of the Shadow Moses incident is made public and denied by the government. The denial is rather flimsy, because Metal Gear REX's blueprints are sold all over the world, so everyone knows the "walking tank" part of the story is true, at least. As a result, Solid Snake becomes a figure in popular culture with many different ideas of what he's really like, or if maybe the government is telling the truth and "Solid Snake" is just a myth playing up on the exploits of real, but normal, military special forces. Ghost Babel could exist in-universe as a movie or videogame depicting one particular idea of what a Solid Snake adventure would be like if he is, indeed, real.
- During Metal Gear Solid 4 its never pointed out why Raiden is so protective of Sunny. Maybe it's because he thinks his own child would have been the same. Or maybe its because she sounds like his wife.^note
Super Robot Wars loves to play with its Hey, It's That Voice! casting like this, with characters mentioning other characters' similar voices, and even making Shout Outs.
Double Dragon features an actual cabinet of the original arcade game in the scene before the final battle. The monitor of said cabinet gets smashed in an ensuing fight scene.
Captain Lou Albano played Mario in both the live-action and animated segments of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show. In a particularly memorable live-action segment, Luigi mentions that Mario idolizes Captain Lou, who goes missing. Albano appears at the end of the episode, shortly after Mario leaves...
- In the Super Mario Adventures comic serial that ran in Nintendo Power, the first thing we see Princess Peach doing is playing a Super Mario Bros game.
In the Grand Theft Auto universe, California (and possibly part of Nevada) and New York City don't exist, having been replaced by San Andreas and Liberty City respectively, but some of the songs on the radio still reference California and New York City. For example, Grand Theft Auto IV takes place in Liberty City, but the song list still includes "New York Groove" by Hello.
- A radio DJ in Vice City Stories explicitly mentions New York at one point.
- Lampshaded in a Something Awful Forum Let's Play of San Andreas, when the narrator and his friend note Snoop Dogg's rapping about "Compton" is obviously a disguised version of the game's "Ganton." And there's a Jack Thompson Expy who thinks that rap music encourages people to violence.
- In San Andreas, the DJ for the Classic Rock station (K-DST) is voiced by Axl Rose, who often takes shots at the heavy metal/grunge station Radio X. Radio X plays the Guns N' Roses song "Welcome to the Jungle."
A NPC in EarthBound says that he is eagerly awaiting the reference of EarthBound 2. In another level, a closed building is said to be housing a conference for the developers of EarthBound 2 as well. A bit Hilarious in Hindsight, given what happened to the actual EarthBound 2...
Rainbow Six: Vegas had a few Splinter Cell arcade machines in it. However, Third Echelon is mentioned as having gathered intelligence for one mission, so Splinter Cell is probably canon within the R6 universe.
- Maybe Third Echelon or someone else had the games commissioned in that universe so that any reports of the real Third Echelon would be dismissed as made by game obsessed nuts?
In Saints Row 2, it is mentioned that the character Benjamin King from the first game has written an autobiography, which will be made into a movie where King will be played by his real-life voice actor.
Averted in Ace Combat: Assault Horizon, where if you use DFM to do a certain stunt, another character will directly say that "this isn't Ace Combat".