One relating to video games in general: John Carmack (of id Software fame) once said: "Story in video games is like story in a porn movie" (i.e., even if it's surprisingly good, it's not what people actually come for). This quote was considered not to have aged well by the end of The 2000s when the sixth generation of videogames brought forth critically acclaimed games with deep and elaborate storylines.
Zig-zagged. While narrative games do continue to receive mass acclaim, games with more emphasis on gameplay than plot (or lacking plot altogether) made a comeback in The New '10s and remain some of the most consistently commercially successful titles in the medium well into The New '20s, from Competitive Multiplayer to Survival Sandbox to Hero Shooter to Battle Royale Game. To say nothing of how Nintendo is still one of the biggest companies in the business, and they explictly follow a "gameplay first" approach to all their flagship titles.
Even Doom itself has made a comeback with a story that clearly defines how the main character doesn't give a crap about any conversation or exposition, unless it's about killing more demons.
The Arcade GameMichael Jackson's Moonwalker might be weird enough, but it just gets sillier (or creepier) each year: You touch kids (in the video game sense, but the fact they are at the height of Michael's crotch does not help) to gain points and power ups (and in the home version, you cannot advance unless you get all the kids, who are sometimes... hiding), or touch Bubbles the Chimp to get a super Cyborg transformation. And then there's the dance attack: Michael Jackson randomly does one of three dances, and it wipes out all the enemies on the screen.
For a lighter example of this that appears only in the arcade Moonwalker game, there are three players, each with a different color of the Smooth Criminal getup. One is the classic white suit with blue shirt, another is red with a white shirt. The third player not only gets Michael wearing a black suit with a red shirt, very similar to the outfit from the much later released "You Rock My World" video... but also has a lighter skin tone than the other two, though not quite as light as it was in the video.
In the localization for the NES version of the original Metal Gear, the manual stated that Commander South is your Mission Control, and Colonel Vermon CaTaffy is the Big Bad, while in the actual game, both the commander and the villain were intended to be the same character, Big Boss. Then Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain came along with a Retcon — it turns out that the Big Boss you've been playing through the game as was a body double, and he was the one who faced Snake at the end of the original game, while the real Big Boss only serves as Snake's Mission Control. So, in the end, the commander and the villain were technically different characters after all. The fact that his name is Vermon makes this even funnier.
In 1990, Konami released an unofficial sequel (i.e. produced without Hideo Kojima's involvement) to Metal Gear titled Snake's Revenge for the NES. The title of the game was pretty nonsensical, as it was really about Big Boss (the antagonist) seeking revenge on Solid Snake for foiling his plot in the original game. But then along comes MGS3, a prequel set during the Cold War, which reveals that not only is Solid Snake a clone of Big Boss, but that Big Boss himself used to be called Snake in the past. And now we have The Phantom Pain, which centers around Snake (Big Boss) going on a quest for revenge after receiving a cyborg arm.
The plot, written long before 4chan even crawled out of the memetic primordial soup, repeatedly refers to an evil Chessmaster type only known as "Anonymous," upon whom Black Chamber have vowed vengeance. Clearly, they really don't forgive.
Snake's insistance on calling the Delta Force operative Christine Jenner "Chris" now comes across like he's a big fan of the Kardashians. (Another multi-generational dynasty of luminaries involved in 20th Century historical events, with Theme Naming...)
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty is mostly notable for its Values Resonance, but it does also include a scene where the President of the United States inexplicably decides to grab an agent (who he thinks is a woman) by the crotch. Not that a man elected US President would ever famously claim that he is so famous that he can just grab women by that area, or anything.
Metal Gear Raiden: Snake Eraser is an animated short from Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence centers around Raiden trying to regain the role of protagonist for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots after losing it to Solid Snake by going back in time to kill Big Boss in order to prevent Snake from existing. At the end, he fails miserably and Rose tries to console him by saying, "there's going to be a 5, right?" Eventually, Raiden got to star in another Metal Gear, not in MGS5, but in his own spinoff game: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. And then Ground Zeroes, the first part of V, added an unlockable bonus mission, "Jamais Vu", that allows you to play as Raiden (though since it's a non-canon scenario, it's not quite the same as starring in the game).
Metal Gear Ac!d came out in 2004 and is set during the American Presidential race of 2016. Over the course of the game it slowly comes to light that the establishment Presidential candidate, their aides, and various other prominent government figures and celebrities had been conspiring to kidnap children from all over the world, lock them in a basement, sexually abuse them, and force them to participate in occult Satanic murder rituals. In retrospect, this now seems like a Whole-Plot Reference to the "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory (made extra funny by how unprecedentedly absurd the Pizzagate theory was).
Daiki Yamashita voices Karuraten in Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-, a Winged Humanoid with a mature adult voice deeper than the actor's known young boy range. Shortly after, he voices Zǐtuī Swallow in the Japanese dub of Tale of Food, to whom both aforementioned attributes apply. For extra hilarity, these characters are polar opposites in both appearance and personality.
In another example, when facing Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson's Punch Out, Little Mac needs to survive his power onslaught of uppercuts for a full minute and a half before he has a chance to beat him. Turns out this was Truth in Television. During the time of the game's release, Tyson seemed unbeatable. However, over time and after the upset lost to James "Buster" Douglas, it became clear to fight experts that Tyson was most dangerous during the first four rounds of a fight. If his opponent could survive until then, he had a chance to beat Tyson, as Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, and others would prove. Given that in-game time is faster than actual time in most games, that minute and a half in the game can easily equate to four rounds in real life. In short, one of the best boxing games ever made told people how to beat Mike Tyson before his upset loss and before boxing experts finally figured it out.
Trigger also gives us Johnny, a robotic rival of the main character who challenges you to a jetbike/motorbike race. Twelve years later, Sonic Rush Adventure introduces... Johnny, a robotic rival of the main character who challenges you to a water bike race.
A headgear item that protects the user from the Stop and Slow statuses is called the Time Hat. In 2017, A Hat in Time was released.
On April Fools' Day 2006, GameSpot made a fake news post called Revolution will take lead in 2010. Even though the system continued Nintendo's struggles with third-party support from larger publishers, the Wii went on to become the market leader of that generation, selling more consoles than the competition by a wide margin.
"An overwhelming majority of industry analysts have stated that the favorite to win the next-gen console battle will be the PlayStation 3, with the remaining experts saying that Microsoft's Xbox 360 will take advantage of its head start to market, making it tough to beat." While the PS3 did surpass the 360, it indeed took almost the entire console generation for the system to overcome Microsoft's head start and get that victory.
"The higher costs to develop for [the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360] will be passed on to consumers." — This was before the price of the PS3 was announced, which was FIVE HUNDRED NINETY-NINE US DOLLARS.
"I've heard about the controller and some of the projects Nintendo is working on...and I heard from a source that there are already builds of the Revolution's handwriting technology. Gamers will eventually use the controller to 'write' answers..." — GameSpot must have been giving Nintendo ideas.
Best of all: "Games are meant to be one thing — fun." — This "line" would be the one thing that Nintendo would repeat for the coming years.
Similarly, a later April Fools day Home Page said they had a "preview" for a PSP version of Rock Band. About a year later, Harmonix released Rock Band Unplugged.
Listen closely to the introductions to these 1980s walkthrough videos of Pac-Man and E. T. for the Atari 2600. They're pretty funny given their infamy since then.
Kingdom Hearts: Riku used to be a nice boy but after he gets amazing evil/dark/killing powers everything changes. Riku meets a dead guy who gives him those powers. Riku does evil things but thinks he's a good guy. Riku has a creepy evil laugh that causes players to fear. His voice actor voices another well-known Anti-hero, Light Yagami.
Also in this series, Mickey Mouse has been compared to Yoda from the Star Wars series several times, as they are both short in stature, not to mention their similar fighting styles and agility. Since 2012, Disney has acquired the rights to LucasFilms (and therefore, Star Wars) and it's quite possible to have both of them in a future Kingdom Hearts game.
For KH fans, the Star Wars acquisition deal is the gift that keeps on giving. The first two games offered customizable Gummi Ships that just begged to have X-Wings and TIE Fighters made out of them, and the order of keyblade knights that Terra, Ven, and Aqua belonged to in Birth By Sleep was heavily influenced by the Jedi Order (Mark Hamill was even asked to voice the local Obi-Wan Expy).
The World Ends with You: Pig Noise emblems are always green. This was two years before the much more renowned Angry Birds would begin, featuring actual pigs themselves green, which itself was inspired by swine flu.
In Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, consider the voiceactors for Pixy and PJ and their roles... including Code Geass. Pixy, flying a plane based on Arthurian legend, impales PJ's plane through the cockpit with a laser beam, right before the Mission Zero. In most cases their viewpoints are reversed; PJ believes in fighting for peace, whereas a more cynical Pixy believes PJ to be naive.
Airforce Delta includes a mission where the player has to chase down a falling satellite, shooting off its solar panels to redirect it before it can crash into a populated city. For a game that was a very blatant rip-off of Ace Combat 2, this was a surprising amount of originality. Where it gets funny is that Ace Combat decided to rip that one off themselves for the final mission of Ace Combat 5.
In Armored Core, your Mission Control is voiced by Maaya Sakamoto. Not quite so in the very first game, where the predominant voice you'll hear is none other than...Yukari Tamura. This includes her voice in the "Standard" type Computer-equipped heads and as some operators in several missions. She even did a role as a disembodied voice stuck in a loop playing in a particularly creepy stage. Upon realizing the voice, it may or may not become a Nightmare Retardant.
It goes back even further than that: In Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, when Arthas first meets Tichondrius, he says "What trickery is this? Mal'Ganis! I don't know how you survived, but I'll...", and then in World of Warcraft we learn that Mal'Ganis has indeed survived. And managed to survive that encounter with the player to boot.
The Alliance head of the church is Archbishop Benedictus, he was there since World of Warcraft started (which means before the pope election), and it just happened that pope Benedict XVI had a similar name.
The undead boars in Borean Tundra can give you the Swine Flu debuff. When the outbreak hit the media, people started spamming a link to the in-game disease in chat channels across several servers.
Upon the completion of a certain now removed quest, an NPC in Stormwind delivers this line: "The Defias Brotherhood, you say? Well, you're certainly the bearer of wonderful news, aren't you? Next you're going to tell me that Deathwing is still alive and attacking the city." As it turns out, Deathwing is still alive, and attacking Stormwind is one of the first things he does after his return in Cataclysm. (You can even get an achievement if he roasts you when he does it!)
Speaking of Cataclysm, the epic-rarity sword known as Cataclysm's Edge was released back in The Burning Crusade expansion. Despite the fact, it bears the same striking appearance and color scheme as Deathwing himself, and its name alone should be enough to clue people in on the correlation.
The best Warcraft example goes all the way back to the original game, Orcs & Humans, with its intro narration saying "Welcome to the world of Warcraft." Foreshadowing at its finest!
By now, Leeroy Jenkins have become a popular meme originating from World of Warcraft. In Warcraft III's Orc Campaign's 3rd Chapter, there is a scenario of Grom Hellscream charging blindly into enemy human camps, disobeying Thrall's order. Now the campaign becomes hilarious, because you can easily imagine that Grom is being Leeroy, screaming his name off ("GROOOOMM!! HEEELLSCREEEAAAMM!!") while taking minimum forces to attack human camps and get obliterated all the time until you bring a bigger army... This is way before World of Warcraft where Leeroy originated came to existence.
The Legion expansion was released on August 30th. 8/30 corresponds with Luke 8:30 in the Bible, which is where Jesus casts out a demon that calls itself Legion. It's unknown if this was intentional, but it's a funny coincidence nonetheless.
Almaz's comment about wanting to be Prism Blue becomes funnier due to Bosch playing Prism Blue in the Fuka Desco Show.
In a similar instance, the battle against Prism Red in the first Disgaea is a bit ironic, as Laharl's English VA is also known as the English voice of Rita Repulsa.
Super Mario 64 opens with Mario arriving at Peach's castle, reminiscing on a letter he got from her: "Dear Mario: Please come to the castle. I've baked a cake for you. Yours truly, Princess Toadstool Peach."
On the subject of Super Mario 64, Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto once said, in a 1991 interview, "Who knows what Mario will look like in the future? Maybe he'll wear metallic clothes!" Super Mario 64 does indeed have that.
In one sequence of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the computer TEC convinces Peach to disguise herself as an X-Naut and ask Grodus a question for him. In the process, she learns the X-Nauts' true goal. The first two lines upon her return to the computer room:
Peach: TEC! You terrible machine! So your goal is to conquer the world, is it? TEC: Ofcourse. After all, I was built for that purpose.
There was some art about video game characters helping out with the BP oil spill cleanup, such as Mario. Later, when the leak was fixed, The Colbert Reportmentioned that the design was submitted by an anonymous plumber (perhaps the one who has experience cleaning up such spills in Super Mario Sunshine).
In Super Mario Galaxy, Rosalina, whose Japanese name is Rosetta, travels to a comet and establishes an observatory there. In 2014, a spacecraft named Rosetta did exactly that. No little space creatures calling it "Mama" though.
The Scarescraper has players controlling multiple different-colored Luigis. One of them is orange, which carries an uncanny resemblance to Sponge.
With her chalk white face, blue eyes, lipstick, and reddish dress, the main Creepy Doll in the Rumpus Room looks disturbingly similar to Circus Baby. They both even have two reddish pigtails curved in almost the exact same shape. Technically, they both even have their insides removed, since Luigi removes a gem from inside the doll, and Baby gets her robotic endoskeleton removed by the Scooper machine.
In Guilty Gear X, if you were to enable GG mode and then pick Ky, you'd get a more erratic and bizarre version of him instead, often acting like a robot (might have been the inspiration for Robo Ky in later games). One theory over who he was was that he was a Gear version of him. There was also Kakusei Ky from Isuka, who had similar abilities to Sol (a Super Prototype Gear himself). Come Xrd -SIGN- and we see that Ky has now become part-Gear, making both these versions hilariously (if eerily) prophetic.
In the supposedly tense opening cinematic of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the US president grabs a red phone with "Moscow" on it next to one that says "Tokyo." This becomes excellent with the release of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, where time travel retcons in an Empire of the Rising Sun.
It's really funny to play through the Happy Happyists house in EarthBound (1994) while thinking of Summer Glau in Firefly. "Hands of blue, two by two..."
In the original Mother 2, the mayor of Onett was named G.H. Pirkle, orGeorge Herbert Walker Pirkle. To sever the connection, the English localization changed it to B.H. Pirkle — which, ironically enough, makes him Barack Hussein Pirkle nowadays.
One added to the American version — as Americans wouldn't find strawberry tofu a product of a Cordon Bleugh Chef like the Japanese would, the item was instead translated as "Trout Yogurt." Years later, another Japanese import would demonstrate just how terrible of an idea that would be. What's more, Shigesato Itoi was a panelist on Iron Chef four times, after EarthBound was released.
Ness gets in contact with his dad by calling him by phone, and in the end credits, his family is represented by their in-game sprites...except for his dad, who is represented by a phone. Fast forward to the 2009 song "Threw It on the Ground":
"My dad's not a PHONE!!"
Orange Kid has been trying to invent a method to change boiled eggs back into raw eggs. UC Irvine beat him to it.
The "chateau" in EarthBound Beginnings was actually a church, renamed to avoid a religious reference that would get the game blocked. The player's guide for EarthBound (1994), on the other hand, depicts an actual chateau on the bottom of page 14.
Earthbound Beginnings was originally completed in 1989 as the original Mother for the Famicom, was slated for release for North America as the original Earthbound, but was cancelled as Nintendo of America shifted focus to the Super NES. Just a few years later, another Famicom/NES game, known in the works as Arc Hound, would face an inversion, being completed in Japan but released only in North America as Contra Force as Nintendo of Japan shifted its own focus to the Super Famicom.
The roster of an Amiga fighting game Shadow Fighter (released in 1994) featured a black basketballer and a faqir. These guys might as well be Kazaam's parents.
A rather serious speech by Van ("Master Bad Touch") about people consulting fortune-tellers to decide what to eat for breakfast becomes retroactively funny when watching the fortune-telling episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Guess what Katara does?
Might be intentional on the creators' part: Mega Man ZX Advent featured an unlockable minigame, Mega Man a, all in 8-bit, styled after the original series of games. A few months later, Mega Man 9 was releasednote developed by intiCreates who also developed the two Mega Man ZX games, in all its retraux glory.
From the same game, the Big Bad is called Albert, and he tried to conquer the world with "Uroboros", while the protagonists are a gunslinging male and female, in which at one point in the game, they have to fight the protagonist from a previous game. Cue Resident Evil 5...
Another one, this scene from Super Adventure Rockman has Quick Man save the life of Mega Man from Shadow Man, who throws shurikens at Mega Man, predating Naruto by a few years, where almost the exact same thing happens in the first chapter.
Speaking of the Mega Man Battle Network games, for a series developed in 2001, had disturbingly accurate predictions of a lot of 21st-century technology. In a time where 600MHz was a decent processor speed, 40GB was a decent hard drive size for a desktop, most data was stored inside your computer, most laptops didn't have built-in Wi-Fi, and when they did, the Internet's speed was hardly impressive, the series had all computers in the world connected to each other via the Internet (Internet becoming viable for regular people, and wireless outside the home); applications mainly being run by accessing them from the Internet (Cloud computing); computers in everything, most of which can access the Internet; giant, paper-thin TVs you can mount on the wall (flatscreens); handheld touch-screen devices that, despite being pocketable, could easily access the Internet, check your email, receive phone calls, get messages, run programs, and generally act like a miniature computer (Modern smartphones); and cyberterrorism actually being able to do more than inconvenience tech support for a few hours (modern cyberterrorism). The later handheld devices even looked like Apple products.
In Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch, in the single-player campaign, just before fighting Gamma, Dr. Wily makes you fight through all of the Robot Masters of Mega Man 1-6 one by one. In the Mega Man Legacy Collection, one of the challenges is a huge Boss Rush against every Robot Master from those six games one by one.
The Mechanical Arena from Rockman 4 Minus ∞ is supposed to be a reference to the Arenas in the Kirby games. However, the first arena is in a fixed order (Robot Masters by DWN, Fortress Bosses, Dr. Wily), while the Arena in the Kirby games were in random order with the exception of the final bosses. However, Kirby: Planet Robobot has a mechanical theme and its Arena is not only mechanically themed itself, but every single boss fight (including the True Arena) are in a fixed order. Therefore, it is literally a Mechanical Arena.
The Rockman New Years series of ROM hacks have you fighting a specific boss that's selected based on the Eastern Zodiac of the retrospective year. The 2017 installment note the year of the Rooster has you fighting Storm Eagle in a multi-phase battle... until Chill Penguin shows up, and then the both of them eventually fight you together. Come the Mega Man X Legacy Collections, there's a new challenge mode that pairs you up against two Mavericks at the same time.
In Resident Evil 5, during your final battle with Albert Wesker, he at one point shouts, "THE HUMAN RACEREQUIRES JUDGEMENT!!!!" Chris replies, "And you're gonna judge us? Did you get all your ideas from comic book villains?" Two years later, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came out, both Chris and Wesker are in, and according to the game's Excuse Plot, Wesker is teaming up with Doctor Doom, who is, of course, a comic book villain.
Resident Evil Gaiden, a non-canon game in the franchise, introduced a character with super healing and enhanced senses due to a parasite B.O.W. that was within her body. This was back in the year 2000. Jump ahead 12 years later and Resident Evil 6 has Sherry Berkin with super healing due to a parasite that was forced into her body back in Resident Evil 2 but was then forced into a dormant state due to the vaccine given to her by Claire Redfield.
In Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, the intro music is called "Across The Border". With so many characters on the Tatsunoko side unknown to most Western audiences, hardly anyone expected it to leave Japan.
One of the pages quotes on this wiki describes a munchkin as one who, on being told that this is a game about politics and intrigue in 17th centuryItaly, asks to play a Ninja. Then came Assassin's Creed II. Of course, Assassin's Creed II actually takes place in the late 15th/early 16th century.
In the 90's, Capcom famously took Data East to court for alleged similarities between Street Fighter II and Fighter's History. Years later, Capcom's Marvel vs. Capcom series would popularize the Assist Character feature, an innovation that first appeared in Data East's fighting game Avengers in Galactic Storm.
In one level of Max Payne 2, Max is assisted by a fat, balding, bearded old hobo who claims to be an ex-cop. In 2009, teaser images of Max Payne 3 showed the title character as fat, balding, bearded, and he is no longer a cop.
One of the Heavenly Rewards that can appear in Afterlife (1996) is Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim, described as the opportunity for a blessed soul to control a galaxy from the smallest microbe to the largest space races. The building is a hand holding a orb containing a spiral galaxy. Cue Spore...
Another good one in the same game: The best cloak you can equip in the game has the simple description: "Black cape for vampires." Its name? Twilight Cloak.
In Ōkami, fish get a relatively bad treatment, being food and the basis of a fishing minigame, as it turns out, the final boss is a fish in a mecha, a really dangerous mecha.
In perhaps what is better called a Take That! in Hindsight moment; two NPCS in Baldur's Gate, Palin and Sarah, debate which local gang to join: a gang of thugs who rob & murder for money, or a group of ultra-capitalists who want to take over the world.
And in the Japanese version, the hardest difficulty is called Lunatic. We're talking about a game that precedes Touhou by four years.
There was this picture◊, which mocks ZUN's hilariously bad artwork (especially at the time), that dates from around 2007. One year later, Satori Komeiji◊.
ZUN established Team Shanghai Alice in 2002. The very next year, Alice Margatroid appeared, controlling a doll called "Shanghai".
One fan theory for Hong Meiling is that she's of dragon ancestry. In her fighting game appearance, one of her standard attacks is a burst of blue aura, which is a Qi attack normally accompanied by her saying "JAOOOOOO!!!".
As an in-game example, there's Kogasa Tatara. She's the Stage 2 boss of Undefined Fantastic Object, and as such appears early enough to be part of the demo. She's seen to be rather weak and has an apparently worthless power of "surprising people". And she's not even very good at it. Play all the way through the game, though, and you discover that she's also the EX StageMid-Boss. Surprise!
The story of Primeus. In the game engine M.U.G.E.N, there was a Joke Character named Primeus. The intro to the character would be of Touhou's Yukari Yakumo walking into the screen... and then a Giant Fish From Nowhere suddenly knocks her out from behind. Though this was funny in itself, it became even funnier when a giant fish did appear in a canon Touhou fighting game.
Remember Youmu's theme? It's called "Hiroari Shoots a Strange Bird ~ Till when?" and is based on a Japanese epic. That strange bird was a nue, a shapeshifter. Cue Nue Houjuu later appearing.
Similarly, in Perfect Cherry Blossom, EX Boss Ran Yakumo's final spell card is Illusion God "Descent of Izuna-Gongen". Not very remarkable at the time, especially since Yukari's counterpart spell in the Phantasm stage is far more well-known. 18 years later however, the Stage 5 boss of Unconnected Marketeers is the legendary Iizuna Gongen herself, Megumu Iizunamaru.
In the end of EWI 23, Kogasa appeared next to Myouren's grave, then Ten Desires was released.
beatmania IIDX 6th Style (2001) has a song called "Take It Easy" by an artist named Aya. Fast forward to later in the decade, and we have a Touhou character named Aya and the memetic catchphrase "Take it easy!" Even more hilariously, this was also before the big BEMANI crossover event with Touhou arrange artists.
4 years before doing the "more cowbell" sketch for Saturday Night Live, Christopher Walken appeared in an FMV adventure game titled Ripper, which featured the Blue Öyster Cult song "Don't Fear The Reaper" as its theme music. The bit with the cowbell even plays just as Walken's name appears on the opening credits.
At one point during agentjr's Let's Play of Call of Duty 4, agentjr's ramblings include the quote "And that's why you're gonna get betrayed one day... I promise you that — it might not be me, but it better be someone." It made sense in context, but 3 months later Modern Warfare 2 was released, and you allought to knowwhat happens next. Making his rant even funnier, the context of the quote is agentjr talking about what would happen if Khaled Al-Asad was part of the task force hunting him. A similar situation happens in Modern Warfare 2: TF 141 spends the greater part of the game hunting Makarov and being directed by Shepherd — and it is implied at the end that Shepherd and Makarov have been working together for the whole game.
From a different Let's Play: The third video of baldurk and co.'s LP of Left 4 Dead had Baldurk, playing as Bill, get ambushed and killed by zombies before he could make it into the safe room at the very end. The last words of the video are EthanSteele commenting "Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices." Left 4 Dead 2 had just come out as this video was posted, and fans of the game all know what happened to Bill (again) in its Downloadable Content.
Yet another Let's Play example: Cooked Auto's LP of Halo 2, during the "Delta Halo" level, has him discussing the SPARTAN-III project. He expresses interest in a game focused on them, but then notes that this would be almost impossible without courting a ton of controversy, because of the fact that most of the Spartan-IIIs are Child Soldiers, and highly-expendable ones at that. Cue Halo: Reach a year and a half later, where you play as part of a team of Spartan-IIIs and all but one of them are dead by the end of the game.
Later on in the "Quarantine Zone" level, after a summary of the plot of Halo Wars, he expresses a wish for the game to be ported to PC rather than remaining a 360 exclusive, though similarly to before, noting how unlikely this would be considering its developers went bust right after the game came out. It took almost a decade, but it eventually did receive a port with the Definitive Edition.
The Halo series has "Legendary" as the highest difficulty level. In the Italian version of the game, the difficulty name is, naturally, translated to "Leggendaria". Then came beatmania IIDX's addition of "✝LEGGENDARIA" charts in 2014, as well as the resulting memes.
At one point in Mass Effect, Ashley, when seeing the Destiny Ascension says, "Look at that monster! Its main gun could rip through any ship in the Alliance fleet!" Then the Alliance has to save it later on.
Combining the two memes of "Ah, yes, Reapers," with "My name is Bolo Santosi." gives us "My name is Bolo Santosi. I am the leader of the immortal race of sentient starships known as the Reapers."
The DLC for game 2 causes an amusing moment because, if you play them after completing the main storyline, you are being helped by the Illusive Man after, depending on your choices during the game, you've essentially stolen the Normandy 2, caused the defection of a large chunk of Cerberus personnel including one of his top lieutenants to you, and blew up the Collector base he desperately wanted. He's obviously not one to hold a grudge.
Each of the three background options for Commander Shepard has an associated assignment in Mass Effect. The Earthborn assignment involves Finch, a member of a gang Shepard used to run with, trying to blackmail him/her into getting another member of the gang released from turian custody. If you choose to warn the guard about the gang, and then choose the right conversation options with Finch — for example, not just shooting him — he calls Shepard out for being "in bed" with the turians. For extra potential hilarity, Garrus (the turian squad member) can be brought along for the assignment. Guess which non-human squad member gets upgraded to a potential love interest in the second game?
Back in the first game, when Ashley asks Shepard which side of the cheek to kiss a turian, if Shepard told her that wouldn't be necessary, Ashley will then jokingly reply "You never know, Commander." Cue the Relationship Upgrade with Garrus in 2, and The Big Damn Kiss in Mass Effect 3 if Shepard chooses to continue the relationship with Garrus (for the record, it's the right cheek, Ashley).
One for Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic. Carth and Kaidan often acted as the "voice of conscience" in the party, arguing for light-side / Paragon actions. Now, their mutual voice actor is playing in Once Upon a Time... as one of the ultimate "voices of conscience," Jiminy Cricket!
In game Kasumi wrote an entry on Shepard for Badass Weekly. She's likely grinning like a banshee now that she was the inspiration for Badass Of The Week writing such an article.
In Mass Effect, a male Shepard and Kaidan can joke about a mutual attraction to Liara and Shepard only "winning" because he saw her first by a few minutes. In Mass Effect 3, Shepard and Kaidan, if the player is so inclined, can opt to forget about Liara because they're more interested in each other, even if Shepard did get together with Liara in the previous games. Amusing enough on its own, but a few years later, The Legend of Korra famously resolved its Love Triangle by having Korra and Asami leave their mutual ex-boyfriend Mako behind because they had become more interested in each other. MShenko did it before Korrasami.
Back in 2014 or thereabouts, EA and Legendary Pictures announced a deal for the latter to produce a Live-Action Adaptation of the first game. While said deal obviously lapsed without any results, May of 2021 saw the release of Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, the 4K remaster of the "Shepard/Milky Way Trilogy". And then there are the rumors surrounding Prime Video making a Mass Effect TV series...
There's a bootleg game for the Game Boy Color called Pokémon Adventure which is a hack of an earlier bootleg game called Sonic 3D Blast 5 which replaces Sonic with Pikachu but has him retain all of Sonic's abilities. It's the closest thing we'll ever get to a Sonichu game. It also came out in 2000, the same year the Sonichu character was originally created.
The Games Machine, an Italian PC gaming magazine, has made several faux reviews as April Fool jokes in the 1990s and 2000s, only for similar games to actually come out some time later.
1995: Monolith, a sequel to The Sentinel. Three years later, Sentinel Returns came out. Additionally, a fanmade game called Monolith, created with the intention to turn that joke into an actual game, came out in 2020.
1996: Ghosts 'n Goblins 96, a remake of Ghosts 'n' Goblins with improved graphics. Two years later, a Ghosts 'n' Goblins emulator with interpolated graphics came out. Moreover, in 2001 and 2003, two sequels came out for the PlayStation 2.
1997: a Tomb Raider patch to show Lara Croft naked. Not even a year later, such a mod came out for real.
1998: a PC version of Gran Turismo, with native Voodoo2 support, improved graphics and the ability to send cars to other people through email. Merely four months later, a PlayStation emulator called PSEmuPro came out and actually allowed to do all that.
2007: Grand Theft Auto: World Online, an MMORPG set in all the fictional cities that appeared in Grand Theft Auto. Something similar was actually implemented in 2013 as Grand Theft Auto Online, the multiplayer component to Grand Theft Auto V.
In the Sega Game Gear version of Winter Olympic Games: Lillehammer '94, one of the American athletes is named "H.Montana". Face it, the only "H.Montana" you can think of nowadays is Hannah.
In this post in a Doomworld forum thread about the Deus Ex: Invisible War demo way back in 2003, the poster, responding to another poster stating that Duke Nukem Forever would be an "astronomical failure" if it were ever released, says that Duke Nukem Forever is fully funded by 3D Realms, who reaped quite a profit from Duke Nukem 3D, and goes on to say that although it's questionable whether they would recoup the costs of developing the game, "3D Realms will not go bankrupt if DNF doesn't sell well when it's released in 2009." The poster immediately following him replies to the assumption that it would be out in 2009 with, "Looks like we have ourselves an optimist." Today, the second poster seems quite prescient. Notice the irony is not lost on the first poster, who bumped the thread in 2010 specifically to call attention to it.
As an added bonus; Gearbox Software ended up finishing and releasing the game, and now holds the rights to the Duke Nukem franchise. The company was founded by Randy Pitchford, a former 3D Realms employee who worked on Duke 3D.
This fan song about Duke Nukem Forever, written in 2000 but released in 2007, contains the verse "Duke Nukem or Max Payne, no wonder who's last", originally referring to how much more likely it was to see Max Payne 1 released than Duke Nukem Forever. In 2011, when an actual release date of Duke Nukem Forever had been announced and Max Payne 3 had been delayed again, the same verse acquired a whole new meaning.
Speaking of Deus Ex: Invisible War, the game's intro features Chicago destroyed in a Grey Goo attack by a member of a fanatical cult and Seattle is featured as one of the levels in the first half of the game. Then, exactly a decade later, Shadowrun Returns comes out, featuring Seattle as its main setting and Chicago being ravaged by insectoid spirits from a dark occult-like ritual perpetrated by a seemingly innocuous Happyology-esque organization. Notice a pattern here?
In the game Medieval II: Total War, there were three agents which you could recruit, one of them is the Assassin who, in its European incarnation wears a hoodie and, if you order him to kill The Pope, will do so with a crossbow; flash-forward to Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.
The plot of Batman: Arkham City bears a lot of similarities to The Dark Knight Rises, despite predating it. Both feature a Magnificent BastardHeavy armed with the knowledge of Batman's secret identity who cordons off a large part of Gotham with the intention of destroying it to fulfill the Knight Templar legacy of villain Ra's Al Ghul. Catwoman appears as a Heel Face RevolvingFemme Fatale who is ultimately faced with a choice between abandoning Gotham and staying behind and aiding Batman. Batman himself is shown in both stories being pushed to his physical limits by the machinations of a villain before being outwitted by a Big Bad in the climax. Ironically, Batman realizes the Joker outwitted him after Talia stabs Joker in Arkham City, while in The Dark Knight Riseshe realizes he has been outwitted by Talia after SHE stabs HIM.
In Def Jam: Icon, developed and published by EA Chicago, one of your men will proceed to get a hankering for "those fly-ass EA games" and you will have the option to shill out thousands in order to buy them in bulk and keep him happy. Icon's lack of success proceeded to shut down EA Chicago.
The cover for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10◊. Shortly afterward, it was revealed he cheated on his wife and lost most of his endorsement deals. For extra hilarity points, the tagline on the back of the box was "Feel the Drama."
In Garcia and Dozla's support from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, Dozla accidentally hit Garcia's head while training with a staff. He was originally using an axe, in other words he was training to be a staff-wielding axeman. Then comes Awakening with the Memetic Mutation NUNSWITHAXES and MONKSWITHAXES. Guess which 2 weapons they can use?
In Starcraft: Brood War, one of Artanis' "pissed" quotes was "This is notWarcraftin space! It's much more sophisticated!" A few years later, Warcraft 3 came out with a verrrry familiar storyline if you take out the orc campaign.
Even better, Artanis follows up with "I know it's not 3D!" Warcraft 3, of course, is.
Starcraft: Ghost's title has become even more hilarious since it's become Vapor Ware.
"If the Protoss really wanted to win they would just create a self-replicating army of sentient robots programmed to do the exact opposite of the Zerg: to protect and preserve all life except for the Zerg."
In the Dawn of War Dark Crusade expansion, when the Word Bearers attack the Blood Raven stronghold, one way Eliphas mocks Davian Thule is saying perhaps the he would mount his corpse on golden chair and make an idol of him. In Dawn of War II, something like that happens as Thule is nearly killed by the Tyranids and becomes a dreadnought, so his corpse is indeed mounted in a golden sarcophagus that serves as an inspiring idol to the Blood Ravens (assuming you have the right Dreadnaught plating equipped).
A meta example: In the backstory of the instruction manual, it is said that there were multiple rumors about the sacred realm's entrance, specifically in the context of how to obtain the Triforce, with most of these rumors being false. Six years later, the backstory is fully explored, and guess what kind of rumors the fans start throwing around?
Phantom Zelda is seen in most pictures with regular Zelda nearby, leading to it being referred to as Zelda's Stand. This would end up becoming one of the characters moves in the Smash Bros. series starting in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, where she summons said Phantom as if it was a Stand.
A trailer for a supposed Wii UVideo Game Remake of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask was revealed to be an April Fools' joke... but nine months later in January 2013, it was revealed that Nintendo actually was working on a Wii U remake of a different Zelda game. And then an actual Majora's Mask remake was announced for 2015 for the 3DS.
Related to the above example. IGN gaming website once put out a trailer of an upcoming live-action Zelda film that fooled a lot of people, after it was revealed to also be an Apirl Fools joke. Fast-forward well over a decade later and Nintendo officiallly announced a live-action Zelda film, after the huge success of The Super Mario Bros. Movie
One of many hoaxes about an upcoming Zelda game was one taking place in a cyberpunk future instead of the vague past, in which Link's primary mode of transportation would be a motorcycle. Far-fetched at the time, but then it turned out that this legtimately was one of the potential directions played out with for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and the motorcycle in question would appearing in the game's "Champion's Ballad" DLC for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where the primary reward for completing all of the new quests is a magitek motorbike.
ThisGameSpot April Fools video from 2017 gives a fake tutorial on how to create (via cooking) a key that lets you pilot Guardians in Breath of the Wild. A little over four years later, the "Pulse of the Ancients" DLC was released for related game Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, which includes new Royal Ancient Lab challenges that ultimately unlock the Battle-Tested Guardian as a playble character.
In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Pit of Kid Icarus got an updated character design that, to many, looked remarkably like Sora from the Kingdom Hearts series. Fast forward to E3 2010, which we learn of a new game, featuring the same design for Pit, being made by Masahiro Sakurai's (the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros.) development team, which is called "Project Sora. And years later, Sora himself would end up joining Smash's roster at the tail end of Super Smash Bros. Ultimates DLC run.
Monster Hunter 3 (Tri): The Guild Sweetheart occasionally says "You know, some hunters wish we'd get rid of the Quest Fee. Like the hunters who suck at their jobs. If they didn't mess up all the time, we wouldn't have to charge! Sheesh!" Guess what one of the things Ben Croshaw complains about in his Extra Punctuation article?
Monster Hunter Generations: As the Bherna Gal describes some early tutorial quests, she mentions "And there's got to be one collect-the-unique-mushrooms quest. We don't mess with tradition here at the guild!" This was the last time such a quest was ever issued - Monster Hunter: World and Monster Hunter: Rise both make a point of skipping such busywork quests by making them a separate mechanic.
In the SmackDown vs Raw series, there were constant references on commentary to Michael Cole "never stepping foot in a ring". Come 2011, Cole would wrestle several matches (including one at WrestleMania), making these lines hilarious.
One of unlockable entrances in WWF SmackDown! Just Bring It features the player enter using a motorcycle (based on The Undertaker's American Badass gimmick at the time), but with the motorcycle stalling and going the ramp by itself, before the player rides it again. Undertaker's motorcycle actually suffered this problem at the 2003 edition of the Vengeance pay-per-view.
In April 2007, Game Informer released their annual April Fool's issue-within-an-issue, Game Infarcer. The cover◊ claims that a new Metroid game was going to be developed by Team Ninja, giving it a Dead or Alive Xtreme look. 2 years later, at E3 2009, Metroid: Other M was being made by Team Ninja, but without all the intentional Fanservice.
Ridley has his own stage in Dead or Alive: Dimensions, with a Samus cameo.
Around the time Super Metroid was released, Yoshio Sakamoto did an interview about the game. There's a gem at the end that only gets funnier every time you see a negative review of Other M about the voice acting.
Sakamoto: From the beginning, it was decided that when the game begins, we wouldn't tell the whole story using text. The story had to be told in a minimal way. However, it wouldn't convey the atmosphere. I thought the game's atmosphere was done completely through sound. I thought it would be good if we could do it like a silent movie.
Nintendo eventually declared that the word "Metroid" is a Chozo word meaning "ultimate warrior". So all those people who mistakenly referred to Samus as Metroid are now technically correct.
Even more true as of Metroid Dread in which no living metroids appear and the only thing stopping the game from having an Artifact Title is Samus' metroid DNA.
One of the more contentious moments in Other M is a section where Samus runs through a heated area, taking damage the whole way because despite having it, Adam hasn't authorized her to activate her heat shielding. This makes a couple of lines in Metroid Fusion unintentionally hilarious, especially since these come out of the mouth of the same character that didn't authorize Samus to turn on her heat shielding in Other M.
Ship's Computer: And avoid the ultra-heated areas: your suit can't take such high temperatures yet, but we're working on it. Ship's Computer: There are no ultra-heated areas on this route, so turn back if you enter one.
Other M's Gameplay and Story Integration of Samus being denied use of suit features unless Adam explicitly authorized them (and her going along with this until fairly late in the game, often to her own detriment) makes the Metroid Fusion Ship's Computer even more retroactively hilarious. MeccaPrime'sLet's Play hangs a lampshade on this:
Ship's Computer: Did this "Adam" care for you? Would he sit in a safe Command Room and order you to die? MeccaPrime (via subtitles): (Yes)
Speaking of Game Infarcer, they once made a parody where they claimed Metal Gear Solid 4 will travel further back in time for Snake to battle dinosaurs. Big Boss essentially does that in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker in a series of Monster Hunter-themed bonus missions.
In 1999, Monster Rancher 2 came out. One monster, the Radial Niton, looks like a bright red race car. It has a description that says, "In the ancient era, there was said to be a play called 'Cars.'" In 2006, an actual movie called Cars comes out, and the main character is a red race car.
The single player in Half-Life 2 contained phrases like "I can't believe you made it here this quickly" (and several other variations of it), "We don't go to Ravenholm", "Follow Freeman", "Doctor Freeman, you really shouldn't be out there", "...but things would go so much faster if we had more people with your training" and many others. Then a Speed Run of that game was released...
In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, there is a news report about an app for the "iFruit" where you pee on it and it tells you if you're pregnant. Funny then, funnier after something very similar actually did come out later, as a companion app for Grand Theft Auto V.
In the cutscene that kicks off the True Final Boss of Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Kirby summons a Warp Star via a pink cell phone. Just a few years later in Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, the cell phone became a central mechanic (complete with the ability to summon a Warp Star to take you back to the Hub Level).
The North American commercial for Kirby's Dream Land pit "Dashing Super Guy", an uber-manly fake game character, against the puffball. Kirby himself was portrayed as the small, unassuming character with the hidden potential he is in canon — a far cry from the infamous advertising methods he starred in starting not even a game later. Interestingly, the part at the end where Kirby poses with Dashing Super Guy's hair and shades predates both the concept of Copy Abilities by a year and their individualized appearances by four. The series would also eventually feature everything Kirby didn't have in the comparison: Copy Abilities gave him weapons and (sometimes) big hair, and while Kirby himself never got big muscles, his adversary King Dedede did gain them on a coupleoccasions.
The concept of a Layton/AA crossover has been around as early as 2009.
Another Ace Attorney related one, though nothing happened after seeing the scene in question, aside from being reminded of old episodes of Pokémon: The Series. Phoenix reactions, during JFA, upon hearing Maya say Edgeworth's name reminded people of Brock during the early episodes of the Johto saga/late Orange Islands: "Don't say that name!"
In case 1-2 (Turnabout Sisters) Phoenix can press Gumshoe by asking him if murder victims usually have time to write the name of their killer. Obviously this was a rhetorical question, used to make a point, but Gumshoe's reaction note "Sure! It happens all the time in books and the movies!" becomes hilarious as finding information written in blood is a Running Gag now — it happens in 2-1 (The Lost Turnabout), 3-5 (Bridge to the Turnabout), 4-3 (Turnabout Serenade), 5-1 (Turnabout Countdown), and I-1 (Turnabout Visitor). And it's unusually planted by the killer.
In case 1-5, while cross-examining a certain witness, Edgeworth will note: "Staring at the witness will do you no good, Wright." Two years later, "staring at the witness" became a gameplay mechanic in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney.
Case 3-1 (Turnabout Memories) has Grossberg frequently making references to his hemorrhoids. One of his lines is that they feel like they're doing the 'Harlem Shake'. There was a dance called the Harlem Shake invented in 1981, and it's most likely a reference to that. However, the internet meme from 2013 is far, far, far more famous. The case takes place in 2014. The game came out in 2007 in English.
In 3-3, the victim Glen Elg worked for a computer company and wore a head-mounted display as part of his work. In 2004, the idea of a company where its employees run around with these sorts of displays seemed impractical at the time. Come 2013 and we have Google Glass. Again, the game takes place in 2014.
The voice actors from the Phoenix Wright trilogy get mostly replaced for Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies, not to mention they had to get a new one for Simon Blackquill. So, Phoenix Wright is now played by Sam Riegel, and Troy Baker does Blackquill's voice. The two of them share a big opening speech about justice, and at that point anyone who's played Tales of Vesperia should be getting Flynn and Yuri flashbacks. It gets even better once you realize Blackquill is serving a false jail sentence to protect someone, which is exactly what Yuri briefly does for Flynn in Tales of Vesperia. The two pairs even have similar colour schemes. And the cherry on top? Flynn's second Mystic Arte is called Divine Rising Phoenix.
A reversed instance of this (for the audience; for the characters, it's played straight) occurs in Case 5-4. The Judge asks about the bomb transport case, a crucial piece of evidence in 5-1 and 5-4, and Blackquill jokingly tells him that it's his coffin. One of the final revelations of 5-1 is that the body of the murdered detective, Candice Arme, was hidden inside the transport case during the very trial Blackquill made the joke in. Of course, none of them knew this at the time.
Episodes 275 and 277 of Secret of Mana Theater featured an army of flower enemies beating/chasing various enemies in a fortress, zombies included. Two years later, PopCap Games came out with Plants vs. Zombies. You make the call.
In the H.I.H. Live Action page, it's mentioned that anti-radiation medicine by the name of Ex-Rad has recently been developed. Players of the Fallout franchise should remember a similar drug called Rad-X quite well, first introduced over ten years prior.
Also, within the game, Arcade's quote about Agave and Mesquite Oh. If agave and mesquite were that miraculous, the locals would have figured it out a few thousand years ago. Cue Honest Hearts and the ability to introduce Nuka Cola and Sasparila back to the wasteland.
After retrieving the amulet of Nelo Angelo, Dante recalls a moment where he and Vergil fought over chocolate on their birthday. Although it's Played for Drama in this game, the later games reveal that the brothers fight over little things so often, and those had a bigger impact on Vergil. In DMC3, Vergil still tries to take the amulet of Dante even when they're in the demon world, but Dante just jokingly responds "No way, you got your own." And as revealed by the in-game "Old Man's Diary" document in DMC5, it got to the point where Vergil developed a habit of writing his name on things to make them "truly his".
In the finale, Dante mocks Mundus's vow to return to the human world someday with the retort "Goodbye! And when you do come back, give my regards to my son, will ya?". This statement becomes hilarious when taken literally, as laterinstallments reveal that not only is Dante still single after several years in canon, his brother Vergil is the first to have a son, Nero.
In Dante and Trish's first encounter, she attacks him by throwing a bike at him, which he blasts apart easily. In fifth game, Dante acquires a pair of chainsaw Devil Arms which can transform into a bike after defeating the demon Cavaliere Angelo. And the cherry on top is that Trish was being used as a Living Battery for Cavaliere when Dante defeated it.
Arius's corporation is named Uroboros. Sound familiar? Remember that the series was birthed from a discarded concept for Resident Evil 4. The hilarity only magnifies if you consider how Arius's international enterprise resembles Wesker's dealings with Tricell, never mind Possessed Arius sporting some very Ouroboros-esque tentacles along with a core on his chest that resembles Wesker's weak points in the final battle of RE5.
The prequel novel has Dante teaming up with a woman named Beryl who, after their adventure is concluded, gives Dante her anti-tank rifle as collateral. The very next game introduces Lady who has a lot of similarities to Beryl (including having a large gun) and would become infamous for constantly hounding Dante for how money he owes her in the anime. And while Beryl shows obvious attraction to Dante throughout their time together, Lady reacts to the idea of dating Dante with disgust twice. The hilarity becomes magnified when you consider that timeline-wise, Dante meets Lady before Beryl comes into his life.
(Beowulf, the final Devil Arm Dante receives in this game, is a set of gauntlets and greaves) allows him to whip out a string of physical combos that pay homage to several famous martial artists (both real and fictitious), with many of these moves being evocative of the Street Fighter characters; he even uses variants of the Shoryuken (Rising Dragon), Shin Shoryuken (Real Impact), and Shinkuu Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku (Tornado). Dante's personality and sense of style (such as his preference for the color red) has had many fans likening him to a more Awesome version of Ken Masters. In Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, and the anime, Dante is voiced by Reuben Langdon, the voice actor of Ken Masters in the dub of Street Fighter IV.
When Lady tells Dante to take her Kalina Ann, he asks her how much she's going to charge him for it. She only asks for his name in exchange, but laterworks would actually depict her as a major source of Dante's constant debt.
In the Special Edition of this game, Vergil's campaign begins with him reading a book in a library. Arkham then appears and thinks Vergil might be looking for the history of his father, Sparda. However, Vergil says that it's not what he's looking for. Years later, Devil May Cry 5 and its Visions of V tie-in manga reveal that Vergil loves poetry, creating the retroactive implication that he might have been reading a poetry book in that cutscene.
Vergil shouts "Why isn't this working?!" in a frustrated tone when the ritual to fully unseal the Temen-ni-gru fails. When playing as Vergil in the Special Edition, he will also kick the ornamental spear to activate a machine after being slightly annoyed beforehand. Although the game simply reuses Dante's animation in this part of Mission 5, it amusingly depicts Vergil being frustrated on smaller issues.
The end of Mission 14 has Dante riding Lady's motorcycle to rapidly climb up the Temen-ni-gru tower while killing some demons along the way using the bike itself. Unfortunately, the bike explodes towards the end of the cutscene due to Dante overloading the engine. Devil May Cry 5 would later return to this concept and implement it in actual gameplay with the Cavaliere Devil Arm, a motorcycle that has the added bonus of being able to split intotwo chainsaws.
Arkham at one point makes an offhand comment that "A storm is approaching" while going off to deal with Lady while Vergil is glancing after him. Vergil's theme song in Devil May Cry 5 includes the lyrics "I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING!", creating the hilarious implication that Vergil really did like that line.
It's more hilarious in a Black Comedy sort of way, but there was a hurricane titled "Virgil" in 1992.
Vergil's "Give that to me." line in the Final Boss battle implied that he's a greedy sibling who still wants to take his brother's amulet no matter the circumstances. This also evoked a laugh from the fans, which resulted into the memetic "Greedy Vergil" image macro. More than a decade later, it turns out this is actually an intended characterization for Vergil and not just a one-time moment Played for Laughs. The in-game "Old Man's Diary" document in DMC5 reveals Vergil having a tendency to write his name on things to make them "truly his" because he and Dante fought over things so often.
This game features a villain named Arkham and introduces his daughter Lady. Batman: The Telltale Series featured a villain named Lady Arkham who was also out to avenge a dead loved one, albeit through much more ruthless means.
One of the announcements made at Microsoft's E3 2014 press conference was Scalebound, a now-cancelled game that was developed by PlatinumGames and featured a protagonist named Drew who was more or less inspired by Nero. Fast-forward to E3 2018, and not only does 5 get announced at the same company's conference, but the game features Nero with a new appearance and hairstyle that resembles that of Drew.
Parts of this game are downright hysterical when viewed in the context of the 2013 reboot:
DmC: Devil May Cry's Dante has some of Nero's characteristics; being a young, rebellious, hotheaded devil hunter who gets Character Development throughout his game and even has some of his moves. Here, Nero looks like a recolored version of him fitted with a mechanical right arm, a possibly well-intended nod to the reboot.
Because the reboot had been controversial among fans of the classic continuity since its trailers were released in 2010, said fans have been hoping for a true sequel to the numbered series. This caused a long-running hype in the Internet. In light of 5's existence, some even wondered if releasing DmC was a business strategy or "publicity stunt" by Capcom to increase the hype not only for this game, but the online exposure of the whole Devil May Cry franchise as well.
At the infamous DmC presentation event at GDC 2013, the art director for the game, Alessandro Taini, in the midst of the topic of his belief that the original Dante was "too flamboyant", said he tried to imagine the original Dante in a Western movie, and the result was Brokeback Mountain. Five years later at NYCC 2018, one of Dante's new weapons revealed at the event is Dr. Faust, a demonic cowboy hat that uses Red Orbs as ammo. Fast forward to this game's release, and cue Dante performing a very flamboyant, Michael Jackson-esque dance in Dr. Faust's introduction cutscene.
The reboot began with Dante and Vergil reforging the brotherly bond that had been missing since they were kids and working together to stop the Big Bad through much of the game's story, only to end with the two becoming enemies due to the tragic results of Vergil's resentment and ambition. Here, Dante and Vergil both start off the game as enemies and work together to stop the Big Bad through much of the game's story simultaneously due to the tragic results of Vergil's resentment and ambition, and end the game reforging the brotherly bond that had been missing since they were kids. In general, the whole idea that the utterly divisive attempt at a Continuity Rebootconcluded with Vergil's Downfall and the much-beloved return of the original seriesends with the course-correction of Vergil's character. Come the Special Edition, the chorus of "Bury the Light" sums it up best:
"I am reclaimer of my name!"
In 4, Dante calls Sanctus an "old fart" during the latter's orchestrated demon invasion to be Fortuna's "savior" and makes fun of his old age during their encounter. In 5, he has aged radically and fans are making fun of it.
One of the most memetic and narmy cutscenes in 4 is "Agnus Redux", where Agnus and Dante do an over-the-top Shakespearean performance by exchanging hammy theatrical quotes in the style of Hamlet, accompanied by dramatic lighting effects. 11 years later, Dante performs a Michael Jackson-style performance in front of Nico, with colorful stage lighting. He just entertained the father and the daughter with a "classic" and a "modern" performance, respectively.
5 was developed with the RE Engine, the same game engine that was used for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil 2 (Remake) which was released before this game. Now remember when the whole Devil May Cry series was born fromResident Evil 4's first prototype? It even gets hilarious as in RE7 one of the bosses, Jack Baker, wields a pair of chainsaws modified into a pair of chainsaw shears. Here, Cool Old Guy Dante has Cavaliere, a motorcycle Devil Arm that can be split into a pair of giant chainsaws.
The fact that Nero can use the Mega Buster becomes this when one remembers his voice actor provides the voice of Zero. Even more hilarious is that Zero also had an arm cannon but forewent using it to make him distinct from a gameplay standpoint until Mega Man Zero, where he used a sword and gun interchangeably, and that the first game Bosch voiced Zero in had him visit the world of Mega Man Zero and quip (albeit without any voice clips) "I'm Zero, not Mega Man Zero." In addition, Zero's DLC costume in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is Mega Man X.
The Mega Buster is even funny outside of a Mega Man context; one of Dante's biggest influences is famous for having an Arm Cannon, yet it's Dante's protege Nero who gets one instead. Even funnier, when Nero regrows his arm, Nico redesigns her Devil Breaker to fit over his new arm, which is essentially the inverse of what Cobra does (a prosthetic left arm that hides his Psychogun).
Before he was officially revealed, the only indicator of V's appearance was his enigmatic back shot from the poster with dark hair and longcoat, leading many to compare him with Noctis from Final Fantasy XV. When V's appearance was officially revealed in the TGS trailer, many were disappointed that he did not resemble Noct at all, but instead bizarrely, Kylo Ren. However, V's playstyle showcased later in the TGA trailer turned out to be startlingly reminiscent of Noctis's, making use of summons of both creatures and weapons, mixed with in some Teleport Spam to get sneak attacks in.
When "Subhuman" was released, it was criticised, among other things, for being advertised and considered more fitting for the reboot Dante more than the classic Dante whom it was made for. Upon release, it's been noted that the song once again fits another character, this time being Vergil, with the focus on "Omega" as Vergil's title is "The Alpha and the Omega", being "Subhuman" reflecting how he always considered his humanity to be a weakness and would be proud of being less than human, and "You cannot kill me" reflecting the character's Joker Immunity. This led to further jokes that the composer had no idea who they were writing a theme for.
This is not the first time a protagonist played by Bosch had as his final opponent a villain played by Southworth. Fans were even joking that the final duel between Bosch and Southworth's characters was basically Nero vs Vergil long before Nero and Vergil faced off for real in 5.
Way back in the day, during the playthrough of the DMC series on Yo Videogames, Max jokes that Kyrie's gift to Nero is going to begin vibrating due to the box having a mysterious length. As it turns out, Max accidentally predicted the Sweet Surrender arm.
For most of the series, despite being voiced by a former Power Ranger, Vergil behaved more like the Japanese counterpart of his actor's previous character, who did not have as much redeeming qualities as Eric and was more blatantly opportunistic and power-hungry. And then after he's beaten and travels to the underworld with Dante, he gains a friendly rivalry and dynamic not unlike Eric has with his former bitter rival Wes at the end of the show and beyond.
Before this game came out, a death metal band named Bury the Light made a song called "Deadweight".
Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology had a pre-order bonus disc called Lemon Gummi with several of the Tales series heroes talking. At one point, they were asking for more spin-off ideas and a Dating Sim was suggested. Jade saw his role as that of the physics teacher and asked Luke to hand out some prints. Luke complained, saying he was the student council president and too high a position to do it. Jade voiced Himuro Reiichi in Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side in 2002 and Luke voiced Hikami Itaru in Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 2nd Kiss in 2006.
In oneMass Effect discussion, a person said: I could come up with some ties to Mass Effect from Norse myth if I had to lol. How about the Rainbow Bridge (Bifrost) connecting Earth with Asgard being a metaphor for the Mass Relay? Now, nearly three years later, the Thor movie came out, and there is quite a bit of similarity between the devices.
Both even end up destroyed by the actions of the protagonist at the end of the series/movie.
In the SF fandom, Sagat was occasionally referred to as BOB "SAGAT" (as in Bob Saget). Now, in SFxT, you can play as Sagat alongside Bob from Tekken 6, meaning that Bob Sagat lives on.
The voice sets for the Dwarven Warden and their respective voices for the Reapers, many regard Sovereign as cold and calculating while Harbinger is a well of silly memes. Well Peter Jessop voices the cocky dwarf voice set while Keith Szarabajka voices the smart dwarf voice set.
From Nerf NOW!!, Strip 534, which was released about a day or two after the Uber Update. Now, have a look at one specific item that Valve added into Team Fortress 2 on the first of July, about a week after the Uber Update.
One comment on a pirate themed Team Fortress 2 cover art was about the Demoman getting a stump leg. Later ...
Pyro is know for being Ambiguous Gender and The Faceless. Quite fittingly, there's a 1964 thriller film called Pyro: The Thing Without a Face.
In May of 2012, Star released an April Fool's video that pretended to show the workings of a few new weapons, like he regularly would. One of them was a melee weapon for the Pyro that increased movement speed while active, at the cost of taking increased damage from enemies. A little over a year later, the Pyro's Powerjack was reworked to do just that (though not to the ridiculous degree seen in the video).
In South Africa, a toy store chain called Reggie's once sold a Famiclone under the name Reggie's Entertainment System. Several years later, a man by the name of Reggie Fils-Aimé would become president of Nintendo of America.
Homefront's timeline places North Korean leader Kim Jung-il's death in mid-2012 of a sudden stroke. In Real Life, he would be dead due to a sudden stroke with less than two weeks left in 2011.
The quality of Left 4 Dead 2 is hotly debated among fans, but the most common criticism in terms of the game's overall difficulty and the bugs/glitches is that Valve hired horrible play testers and that the players themselves would do a better job finding all the flaws and fixing them. Nearly 2 years later, Valve decides to release a custom campaign and all the Left 4 Dead 1 maps for Left 4 Dead 2 in the beta stages so that they can improve maps and squash bugs based on player feedback so the Cold Stream DLC is polished.
It also doubles as Be Careful What You Wish For since the same people that claimed they can be better testers are now complaining how buggy and glitchy the ported maps are and are screaming at Valve to work faster in fixing the bugs while also forgetting that Valve is very infamous for their Valve Time.
Nintendo also went through a similar event. When Nintendo dominated the gaming market in the 1980s and 1990s, they had the Nintendo Seal of Quality slapped onto every game they approved, which meant that the game didn't have a single Game-Breaking Bug (or at least ones not easily found) and that the game would not break your console. It wasn't exactly proven whether or not the seal of quality was also a part of Nintendo's then draconic polices on censorship, but Nintendo had eased up on restrictions when they released the Wii and made the console appealing for new and smaller game studios to develop games on. This in turn caused a slew of poorly made games to be released on the console, including those with game breaking bugs. People then demanded that Nintendo should clamp down on poorly made games and enforce quality control, despite the fact that the same people wanted Nintendo to stop enforcing policies on game studios with an iron fist.
Related to Valve, the Half-Life: Opposing Force expansion pack featured a sniper rifle referred to as the M40A1, which in-game reloaded with a detachable magazine not present in the real-world gun. Fast-forward to 2009, and the USMC rolls out the M40A5, a later variant of that rifle that does load from detachable magazines.
For that matter, every other game in which reloading is necessary which features a version of the M40 before the A5 came out (except Call of Duty 4) falls into this for the same reason — nobody wanted to code one-round-at-a-time reloading for a weapon that was not a shotgun, until then.
Another one related to Valve and Left 4 Dead 2 — the German version of the game, to make up for the content-cuts for violence, included four extra weapons taken directly from Counter-Strike: Source. At the same time, most of the in-game posters for the campaigns had the characters holding what appeared to be Mk 18 CQBR rifles rather than a weapon that actually appears in the game. Three years later came Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which reused Left 4 Dead 2 models for some of its weapons and replaced the old M4A1 with the Mk 18.
Video games with a focus on guns in general seem to have a good chance of predicting future models. Parasite Eve included a weapon labeled as an M1911A2 six years before a project was undertaken in the US military to create M1911 variants with that name. GoldenEye Reloaded, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, and PAYDAY 2 all sequentially featured an MP7 with an underbarrel rail instead of an integrated folding foregrip, respectively three, two, and then one year before H&K released an MP7A2 model which replaced the folding grip with a rail.
The name of Doom 3 antagonist Dr. Betruger can also read as "a Doctor who committed a fraud" in German. The name is funny because in 2011, many famous Germans lost their doctor's degrees because they committed fraud in their doctoral theses.
Part of the reason the Donkey Kong arcade game was created was because Shigeru Miyamoto was a big fan of Popeye, but he couldn't get the rights to make a game based on it. In 1982, Nintendo got the rights from King Features Syndicate to create a Popeye arcade game (though the game is played differently than Donkey Kong).
Modern Warfare 2 featured the ability to call down a guided missile launched from a Predator UAV. Saints Row: The Third featured the similar Reaper Drone, which allowed the player to watch from the perspective of said drone while launching either dumb-fire missiles or guided ones similar to the Predator. Around the same time, Modern Warfare 3 also features a Reaper UAV, which works like a combination of the Saints Row version's firing modes (missiles guided via laser without the Arrow Cam).
Concerning the Fandom Rivalry between Call of Duty and Battlefield, it's rather funny that one of the default names for singleplayer bots in Battlefield 2, released two years before Call of Duty 4, was "J. Price". Moreso when the Battlefield 2: Special Forces expansion added the British SAS as a playable faction.
As a joke, someone created a fakeNational Geographic Magazine cover, featuring a cardinal photoshopped to look like the iconic Red Bird from Angry Birds. Later in 2012, National Geographic released a tie-in book called Angry Birds: Fed Up, Feathered, and Furious — and none other than a cardinal is featured on the cover!
Katawa Shoujo has a meme in which Lilly asks "Who's there? ... No answer, must be that deaf bitch", in reference to her rivalry with Shizunenote Lilly can't see Shizune, and Shizune can neither hear nor respond to "Who's there?". Late in her route, she asks Misha for some papers, then thanks her when she gets them. Lilly receives no reply, causing her to realize after a moment that it is Shizune, leading to a Heartwarming Moment as the two set aside their differences.
After over 10 years of Super Smash Bros. Melee's release, in Fire Emblem: Awakening, the imposter who claims to be Marth is revealed to be the Chrom's future daughter Lucina, who resembles Marth eerily well, but is a female. Compare to the known conception that many people who met Marth in Melee were very caught off by his feminine appearance and thought he was a woman.
Awakening gave us another one: the character Nagi from Shadow Dragon is commonly thought to be the reincarnation of the Divine Dragon Naga, but the second most popular theory had her as an older Tiki from the future. The former is most likely true, but Awakening, set 2000 years after Marth's games, does indeed feature a Future BadassTiki◊ as a playable character.
And it gets even funnier with certain reveals in the DLC chapters, namely that Naga is a Legacy Character of sorts via Deity of Human Origin. In Awakening'sBad Future timeline, Tiki ends up becoming the next Naga. This means that the "Nagi is Future!Tiki" theory from Shadow Dragon was closer to the mark than people thought... In fact for all we know, in at least one continuity it could actually be true!
A popular pairing in Awakening is Miriel and Ricken, as they are both mages (and grants Miriel's son, Laurent, very good stats in-game). With the English release of this game, Miriel and Ricken are voiced by Tara Platt and Yuri Lowenthal respectively, who are married in real life.
Dremoras, one of the lesser Daedra in service to Mehrunes Dagon, appear as grey-skinned, yellow-eyed Horned Humanoids with shaggy black hair. They're a Proud Warrior Race, and every single one of them is trained as a warrior, with their culture revolving around combat. Their society is based around a Fantastic Caste System, with multiple levels of castes, each containing its own hierarchy of sub-castes. They even come from a parallel universe outside of the one the games take place in. So essentially, Mehrunes Dagon has the trolls from Homestuck in his service. This is actually hilarious from both perspectives — not only are the Dremora very similar to trolls, Andrew Hussie based the Alternian alphabet on the Daedric alphabet from the games, which is used by — you guessed it — the Dremora. And, seeing as he picked it at random from a website hosting fonts for various fictional alphabets, he had no idea that the one he chose was used by a civilization with a lot in common with his own. And if that wasn't enough, wearing Daedric armour (particularly the version◊ in Oblivion) — which, of course, is worn by Dremora — makes your character look a lot like an Imperial Drone!
Sonic games are often on Nintendo consoles, several are even Nintendo exclusives. This was unthinkable back in The '90s, when references from Nintendo towards Sega or vice versa would be Take Thats at best ("Genesis Does What Nintendon't").
Sonic the Hedgehog CD has one that happens within the game itself, depending on the version. The main boss theme in the Japanese and European versions of the original version as well as all versions of the 2011 remake of the game when the Japanese soundtrack is chosen over the American one has a sample from the song "Work That Sucker to Death" by Xavier looped as part of the lyrics played in an upbeat manner. A boss in the middle of the game has Sonic having to defeat Dr. Eggman by running quickly to make a conveyor belt wear down his current device until it explodes. In other words, for that boss Sonic really does have to "work that sucker to death".
For its original release, Sonic the Fighters (A.K.A. Sonic Championship) saw a limited release in American arcades because Sega of America's executives found the cartoonish slapstick "too violent" and that it would tarnish Sonic's image. Nine years later, Shadow got his own spin-off game, and it was far more violent and intense than Fighters, and yet Sega of America heavily promoted it. And also, Sonic Riders had lots of cartoonish slapstick just like Fighters, and SoA was fine with that too.
Also, Fang the Sniper was actually going to use a sniper rifle, but Sega wouldn't allow realistic firearms in the series. Later 3D titles had no such problem with those.
Also, the main reason Gamma was put into Sonic Adventure was to satisfy fan demand for the ability to shoot up enemies in a Sonic game, as SEGA couldn't possibly imagine a regular Sonic character wielding a real gun. Yeah, 2005 says hello.
On the subject of Sega, they also published a Gamecube game known as Phantasy Star Online. This game was one of the few games to take advantage of the Gamecube's optional networking accessories, which most Nintendo games completely ignored. Even when working with Nintendo hardware, Sega still does what Nintendon't.
Someone complains about Prince Harry's mischief. Now go fast forward about the Real Life Prince Harry's escapades.
One of the nuns in the Heaven's Above Abbey tells the player "I'm sure there will never again come a time when you are forced to submit to the will of another." Marry Debora, and that is exactly what will happen.
In the 1997 manga adaptation, the Hero's daughter is named Sora (or "Sky"). This is five years before fellow Square Enix property Kingdom Hearts was released, where that name belonged not to a girl, but rather to a boy with the Keyblade. Furthermore, both are eventually revealed to be The Unchosen Ones of their respective destinies. Do note that the manga was created over a decade before the DS remake, where she and her brother Ten (or "Heaven") had their Canon Names changed to "Madchen" and "Parry".
Crash Bandicoot was created to be the Sony PlayStation mascot. Fast-foward ten years and the series has several games that are Nintendo console exclusives.
Both Haken and Kaguya were expies of Sanger (Haken Browning has Sanger's white hair and his color scheme while Kaguya has Sanger's BFS, and the Kiai "CHESTO!"). And now, all three show up; it will be amusing to see how Sanger will react to both of his expies.
Not to mention, Two 'different' Zankantous in one game (by Sanger and Kaguya)
Reiji and Xiaomu, along with Haken and Kaguya, after the latter two debutted, are featured in games where the protagonists are a male character voiced by a Seki-surnamed seiyuu (Alady and Kogoro) paired with a buxom lady voiced by one of the two stars of Lyrical Nanoha series (Neige and Mii).
During the days of Sega Saturn, to promote the Sakura Wars game, there's a commercial where Segata Sanshiro is playing with the main heroine, Sakura Shinguuji, under a park of cherry blossom trees. Sakura returns in Project X Zone 2, which just happens to also feature Segata. Any wonders if they're going to refer to the aforementioned commercial? The answer is a big resounding YES.
Planescape: Torment was released in 1999. The shopkeeper of the Curiosity Shop in Clerk's Ward: an alu-fiend named Vrischika. Oh, and she has blue skin and yellow eyes. And you can sell your party members into slavery to her.
For bonus points, Capcom also released NES-style premium avatars of the cast of Street Fighter IV (which includes all of the original eight SFII fighters) in the PlayStation Store at least a year before the announcement.
Two of the villains in the Kevin/Charlotte path are a Monster Clown named Goremand (Deathjester in the Fan Translation) and a man named Heath. A villain from a rival faction in the same game is called "Darkshine Knight." Then rolls in 2008.
Goremand's official name and his name in the Fan Translation, Deathjester, are Woolseyisms — a more literal translation of his name would be "Death-Eating Man". Hmmm.....
beatmania IIDX 12 Happy Sky, released in 2006, introduces a song called "Mei", whose Another chart is one of the most infamously difficult charts in the entire series. Fast forward to 2009, and there is a novel and anime series called Another, which featues a protagonist named Mei.
When Doom was released, moral guardians had concerns regarding Doom like games and Virtual Reality devices. Later, a version of its successor, Doom 3, was one of the first games which were announced for the VR headset Oculus Rift.
A drama CD for Tales of Xillia shows Milla dressed up as a nurse. This becomes hilarious when you learn that Minae Noji, Milla's voice actress, is a regular cast member of General Hospital.
People that were not impressed by the visuals of the Wii demanded that Nintendo should make an add-on or a new console that would make the Wii have HD graphics. The Wii U comes along several years later and is pretty much an upgraded Wii.
A Bayonetta reference appeared in Madworld, which was released beforehand, and was a Wii exclusive, while Bayonetta was a 360/PS3 exclusive. But as of Bayonetta 2, all further games of the series are going to be Nintendo-exclusive.
Brentalfloss's "Ducktales WITH LYRICS" (aka the NES game's moon level theme with lyrics) includes the lines, "This oughta be the ending credits theme ... but it was used as a level tune." Four years later, Ducktales: Remasteredhas the moon level theme playing during the credits after the show's theme, in two formats!
In one of Vert's bonus voice files in Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, the Leanbox goddess mentions about wishing to have her own younger sister. Then comes Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia's phone division in September 2013, which technically makes Nokia's hybrid handheld console and phone, the N-Gage, a Microsoft-branded handheld console (even though it was discontinued long before the acquisition).
A running gag in the Neptunia series is about Noire, the Playstation character, being a loner and having no friends... years later, Playstation 4 games refuse to support crossplay with other consoles and PC.
A terabyte disc is a plot device used in visual novels Ever17 and Remember11. It has been predicted that terabyte discs will be on sale around 2015. A little late for Remember11, but just in time for Ever17. Even the original writers got a chuckle out of that.
Due to the rising popularity of the anime Sleeper HitGirls und Panzer in 2012, fans of World of Tanks have been churning out game mods based on the tanks used in the show. Fast forward to 2013, and we have the game's developers coordinating with Studio Actas with in-game exclusive content in celebration of the opening of the game's Japanese server cluster.
Even better when you consider that Girls und Panzer has occasionally been described as World of Tanks as an anime.
Jin Haganeya, the writer for Demonbane, admitted on his Twitter feed his first use of that name was naming the Grungust when playing Super Robot Wars 4 as a kid.
Man, I can't even begin to imagine what expression I'd have had if I'd heard about this when I was a kid.
Prior to UX, Hikaru Midorikawa was a big proponent of wanting to see Demonbane in Super Robot Wars. It helps he's the voice actor for Master Therion. Seems like someone at Banpresto listened...
Hatsune Miku being included, in some form, alongside the franchise that inspired her creation.
Primal Rage, though some came from the game's toyline, heroic gorilla leading a group of animals, which includes a deinonychus, against an evil group led by an evil Tyrannosaurus rex? Sounds a lot like Beast Wars.
In Devil Survivor, characters communicate by using Nintendo DS lookalikes that can send and receive mail. One generation of video game platforms later, the Nintendo 3DS introduced the SwapNote feature...and then this became Harsher in Hindsight instead when SwapNote's online message exchange feature was wiped due to child safety concerns.
In Record of Agarest War 2, players can opt to marry the third generation protagonist to Fiona who's voiced by Kana Asumi. Cue a few years later and said voice actress is now a married woman.
This fan art showing the Koopalings in Mario Kart, created in 2011. They would go on to become officially playable characters in the eighth installment for the Wii U (though not all in one kart as seen in the pic).
On a related note, there existed fanart of the Inklings in the same situation shortly after their debut game released. Crack Fic back then, not so much after the release of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
According to Wii Sports Resort, only electric cars are permitted on Wuhu Island. That's apparently not the case anymore, according to 7, which features two tracks on Wuhu Island (one loop around the island, and another that goes up the mountain). Apparently the restriction doesn't apply to karts, just "cars"?
7 features Rosalina's Ice World, an icy course hosted by a blonde "princess" in a blue dress. Two years after 7 was released, Frozen came out in theatres, and it was quick for some to point out the parallels between Elsa and Rosalina.
The 2006 arcade racing game Fast And The Furious: Drift features a Ford GT and a '67 Mustang Fastback among the cars. It also allows you to customize those cars with various "Rice Burner" modifications, including neon lights. Five years later came the release of Fast Five which features among its cars a Ford GT40, the inspiration for the GT and a contemporary of the Mustang Fastback. When Hobbs finds the car has been outfitted with an aftermarket stereo system, he criticizes it saying "might as well put neons on it."
The very title of Arkanoid II: The Revenge of DoH given that "D'oh" has since entered public consciousness as Homer Simpson's favorite expletive.
In 2007, The Happy Video Game Nerd gave his review of Splatterhouse and its two sequels, and one of the major criticism he had with the original was the lack of story despite its premise. Fast-forward to 2010, Derek got what he ask for when a re-imagining of the game was released that had a much bigger narrative than the original, and then some.
Upon the announcement of BioShock Infinite the UK edition of PC Gamer ran a joke page in a throwaway attempt to predict the upcoming title's inevitable Plot Twist. It included such silly suggestions as "The player character is really a dog" and "The bad guy is his own sister." One of their predictions actually turned out to be true: "The player character and the bad guy are really the same person."
Top Fighter 2000 MK VIII, a bootleg fighting game on the Genesis, features Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan as playable characters. Then came an episode of Epic Rap Battles of History where Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan battled each other, this time with words.
On the same theme, when in Bill's Church he suspects that Ellie has stolen something from him, but she denies it. A later cut-scene show us that she stole, amongst other things, a gay male porn magazine from Bill. And the later revelation of Ellies sexuality proved that, no, she wasn't lying.
Bill: I swear to God, if you took anything... Ellie: Hey man, I don't need any of your shit. Trust me.
Wreck-It Ralph bemoaning Pac-Man 's invitation to Felix's party seems prophetic of the yellow icon's inclusion in the latest Smash Bros. gifs with the heads of other popular characters that have, at the time of the aforementioned's reveal, yet to be confirmed to return themselves replacing Ralph's are growing popular.
After all the Warhammer 40,000-esque imagery in E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy, it is oddly fitting that Streum On ended up developing Space Hulk: Deathwing. The image quotes on E.Y.E.'s page said "Not a Space Marine Chaplain. Honestly. Really." in reference to the pictured character's armor, a full year before the Spacehulk trailer debuted starring a space marine Librarian.
Around the time Five Nights at Freddy's, an indie horror game involving killer animatronics at a Chuck E. Cheese's knock-off, started becoming popular, a preview of season 2 of Gravity Falls aired at San Diego Comic-Con 2014, hinting at an episode featuring... killer animatronics at a Chuck E. Cheese's knock-off. Though the episode in question, "Soos and the Real Girl", didn't air until late September, it was an amusing coincidence nevertheless.
One of the splashes added to Minecraft was "Absolutely dragon-free!". Later, the game added The Enderdragon, the Final Boss. The splash was changed to "Mostly dragon-free!".
Around the end of The Happy Video Game Nerd's review of the Castlevania Game Boy games, he expressed that the franchise needed a spiritual successor after discussing his thoughts on franchise's direction. In May 2015, Koji Igarashi unveiled Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a spiritual successor to the Metroidvania-style Castlevania games.
TIE Fighter: The seventh campaign culminates with Maarek Stele flying alongside Darth Vader to save an abducted Emperor Palpatine aboard an enemy capital ship. Revenge of the Sith starts with Anakin Skywalker (the future Vader) and Obi-Wan Kenobi on a starfighter mission to save the abducted Chancellor (future Emperor) Palpatine aboard an enemy capital ship, so you can imagine Vader thinking "Not again..." in the mission.
One initial impression some Dragon Age fans had with Dragon Age: Inquisition was the lack of a canine companion. Turns out you have the Dread Wolf tagging along with you for the entire game.
Doubling as a Harsher in Hindsight, one of the missions in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes has you erase the logos of Metal Gear games from helicopters. After doing this, you get the message: "You might be able to erase the markings, but the memories will never disappear." Later on, Kojima would leave Konami, and Konami removed his name and the Kojima Productions logo from the boxart. Of course, knowing Kojima, this might very well have been Foreshadowing...
Possibly an Ascended Meme now — the item you get for beating The Old Hunters DLC lets you turn into a squid-person.
In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, when Guy and Dekar rejoin Maxim and Selan, Dekar criticizes Guy for neglecting his girlfriend, while Guy points out that Dekar doesn't even have a girlfriend. Dekar proclaims, "My love is my sword!" By this time in the remake,he's already hooked up with Tia.
The box art for EA Sports' UFC 2 prominently features Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor... both of whom were subsequently knocked out in the ring in humiliating upset defeats. Rousey's loss (and the breaking of her undefeated streak) came the day after the cover was unveiled, while McGregor's (his first loss in six years) came just a week and a half before the game was to come out. After McGregor's defeat, Kotaku referred to the cover as "a monument to sadness" and compared it to the Madden Curse.
In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors when Junpei and June are discussing what relation their location has to the Titanic, picking to say that they're on a replica of the Titanic prompts Junpei into a quip somewhat jokingly about how "crazy Titanic fans" might have built an exact replica of the Titanic, and begun advertising to people about the chance of riding on an exact recreation of a ship where 1500 people died. It's now become an actual thing that's being built.
Meta example, but Papyrus the Skeleton from Undertale is presented as an utter loser who is, in his own words, "pretty popular [on the Internet]" since he is "twelve followers away from a double digit count", and doesn't even realizes how utterly unpopular he is. In Real Life, Papyrus has legions of fans thanks to his Awesome Ego and generally being fodder for the Funny page for Undertale on This Very Wiki.
Part of the reason for the Saturn game adaptation of Magic Knight Rayearthtaking forever to reach the states had to do with a conflict about what to rename the protagonists. In the end, the names were left as is, and Working Designs unwittingly did the right thing before the practice of renaming characters itself even became such a hot-button issue and for the most part ceased altogether.
The DC Comics Pack has a lot of fancy new things: The Hero Cape and its gliding ability, wall jumping, and a fancy hub-area that expands as you continue the story. All of these things also appear in LittleBigPlanet 3 (which was announced about 5 months later at E3 2014); Swoop can glide like the cape power, OddSock can wall jump, and similar hubs appeared in the story mode.
It may have been unintentional, but there's a trophy in the first game called "Sackbird." Then LittleBigPlanet 3 came along and Swoop became a character.
A meta example; when Dark Souls II (and Bloodborne to a lesser degree) was released, there was a backlash among fans for what was perceived as the series becoming easier and more "casual" compared to the original. It turns out that this was deliberate; in a pre-release interview for the third game, Miyazaki admitted that he thought the original Dark Souls and Demon Souls were too unfairly difficult, and he wanted to make the newer games somewhat more accessible.
After the 2008 reboot, James McCaffrey would then be in another video game that's also a psychological, episodic thriller where the main gameplay mechanic involves light.
Super Fighter: This is a Taiwanese made Street Fighter IIknockoff that very blatantly lifted from Capcom's aforementioned game. However, some of the Super Fighter cast have some similarities to characters that would be introduced in later iterations and sequels of Street Fighter Games.
Red Man, the resident Blanka (and maybe T. Hawk) ersatznote (He has most of the moveset of the former and his savage nature (minus the noble aspects) and the latter's Native American ethnicity.) is someone who has delusions of being a divine being (even claiming to be the reincarnation of Satan) and killed his former master in the past once he believed himself to have surpassed him. The next year (1994), Super Street Fighter II: Turbo would introduce the fighter Gouki who believes himself "superior to all men" because of his mastery of the Satsui no Hadou (and also murdered his master, Goutetsu, as a demonstration of his power), goes by the alias "Akuma" (translating from Japanese into English as "Demon"), and due to being Hades Shaded is a literal red man.
Bullet is a blonde athlete (a boxer more specifically) from Brooklyn. Several years later, Street Fighter III would introduce another blonde athlete (though a wrestler in this case) who has some Brooklyn Rage in the person of Alex. In addition, Onimaru has some degree of similarity with Necro in that they are people who have been modified by technological/bio-genetic engineering means (though involuntarily in the latter's case) and can stretch their limbs further than any normal person could.
Let's see: An obnoxious obese fighter who has a braided ponytail, are we talking about this game's Joker note (who is already an ersatz of E. Honda, though if he was evil rather just being an Arrogant Sumo Guy) or Rufus from Street Fighter IV?
Altered Beast (1988): The real form of the sorcerer Neff, the one who taunts the player at the end of every level, is a creepy pale bald man in a black tunic who looks similar to Lord Voldemort. However, the game came out in 1988 and the first Harry Potter book was published about 10 years later, while the film series began in 2001.
Guxt has a fidget spinner-shaped enemy.
ThisSuper Mario Kart commercial says that it has "Two speeds: fast and WAY too fast!". Ever since Mario Kart 8 got a 200cc setting, it really has become way too fast for some.
The Sequencer weapon splits a Deadly Disc into multiple copies and throw them at enemies. So, yes... Yes, it is legal.
Another one is where Jet is shown how to turn a lightcycle rod into a crude, but effective, melee weapon. Sam had the right idea, but not the right implementation.
The Energy Claw subroutine is very similar, in appearance and function, to a Sith-styleForce Choke. Appropriately, it's a User-only weapon.
Alan and Jet's rocky relationship and banter can seem oddly familiar to viewers of TRON: Uprising, as Tron and his apprentice Beck have a very similar relationship. note Which has led to some jokes and speculation about Beck's origins.
The fact there is a part of the game where Jet is sent to get something called the Tron Legacy code. Even better when I-No remarks "Tron legacy? It's some kind of upgrade to the original Tron program..." What happened to the poor fellow in that continuityprobably shouldn't be called an "upgrade."
The combined soundtrack for Landing Gear and Side by Side, released in 1997, has an album jacket that shows a road sign for a fork, with the straight path marked with an airplane icon and the right path marked with a car icon. One of the memes to gain popularity in 2018 revolves around an image of a car drifting onto an on-ramp, with the labels for the thru-traffic and off-ramp paths replaced accordingly.
A scrapped concept for Super Mario Odyssey would have involved Bowser using a cap of his own to Capture Princess Peach, transforming into a Cute Monster Girl in the process. By the time the artbook revealing this came out, however, it had already become widely popular to depict Bowser in a Peach-like form called Bowsette... and it was inspired by Toadette's "Peachette" transformation from New Super Mario Bros. UDeluxe, of all things.
During a time when Nintendo and Sony were going to be partners, there was a console planned where it could play CDs and Sony would make games for it. Fast forward to the present, people who hacked the SNES Classic were able to play Playstation games on it.
The online service for digital-purchase-and-download games on the Xbox family of consoles is known as Xbox Live Arcade. In 2018, Halo: Fireteam Raven was released as an arcade game and features integration with Xbox Live accounts. In other words, an Xbox Live literal arcade game.
Arcade and NES hockey game Blades of Steel's teams had names in the Japanese version. The Minnesota team was called the Wilds. This is 13 years before the Minnesota Wild would play hockey in the NHL.
The IGN April Fool's Joke for 2019 was "Everything Coming to Switch", a parody of a Nintendo Direct presentation that begins with few tells that it is a joke, but progressively becomes increasingly bizarre. Three of the games claimed to be ported to Switch were Overwatch, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and PC Building Simulator. Fast forward just five months and Switch ports for all three games have been announced!
Before they choose Square Enix as the publisher, DONTNOD Entertainment was told by other publishers that they should change the gender of the protagonist of Life Is Strange, Max, to male but DONTNOD wanted to keep the queer theme since a male and female story is quite typical. The sequel shows that they took the suggestion a try. Quite literally in fact, since the protagonist went from a bisexual female to a bisexual male (of color), making Sean, the protagonist in question, even more atypical of a protagonist than Max.
When retrieving a soda can from the vending machine in Episode 3, Max says "Release the kra-can!" While fairly unremarkable at the time, in 2021 Seattle (where Max lives) would finally get an NHL team... the Seattle Kraken, which uses "Release the kraken!" as a chant.
Ingrid and Ignatz's "C" support involves Ignatz painting a picture of Saint Seiros, and Ingrid convincing him to give her a bigger sword to make her look more knightly and badass. When Ignatz makes the suggested changes, Ingrid remarks that Seiros looks less like a knight and "more like a maniacal demigod". On one of the routes, if Ingrid and Ignatz are in your party, they eventually get to fight said maniacal demigod up close and personal: Archbishop Rhea (who is really the warrior goddess Seiros), who freaks the hell out knowing that you, the vessel for the soul of her dead mother, betrayed her to side with The Empire.
Near the end of the Crimson Flower route, "those who slither in the dark" destroy Arianrhod with "javelins of light" in retaliation for the Imperial army killing one of their agents. Edelgard and Hubert, in a bid to keep the Black Eagle Strike Force focused on defeating the Church of Seiros until they can begin their campaign against "those who slither" in the epilogue, publicly blame the church for the attack, while Lysithea and Yuri privately wonder who really did it. The final mission of Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes' Golden Wildfire route shows Rhea channeling a long-forgotten light magic spell that destroys every allied stronghold on the field as a last-ditch effort to reverse the Church of Seiros army's fortunes in a defiant Last Stand at the Tailtean Plains.
In Hitman: Blood Money Agent 47 is given the opportunity to disguise himself as a clown to infiltrate the target's house and eliminate him. In 2013, a hitman in clown attire shot and killed Francisco Arellano, the leader of the Tijuana drug cartel, during a party.
In 1987, Sega released an arcade Shoot 'Em Up called Sonic Boom. Not only does the game involve you shooting down enemies in a fighter jet, but four years later, Sega would create their future mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the American opening theme for Sonic the Hedgehog CD would be called "Sonic Boom". Also in 1991 marked the debut of Guile from Street Fighter II, who was not only an Air Force pilot, but his signature move was called "Sonic Boom". And then came the Sonic Boom trilogy much later in 2014.
Oracle:(exasperated) What now? Riddler? Two-Face? Some kind of giant Joker robot?
Also another laugh from this line is "Some kind of giant Joker robot?". In Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes, Joker's plan hinges on using a giant robot version of himself to take over Gotham.
When Batman talks to the Joker on a monitor early on, he quips "You were expecting Two-Face?" Not only would Two-Face appear in Arkham City, as stated above, but his voice actor in that game, Troy Baker, would go on to also voice the Joker several times, including in the prequel, Batman: Arkham Origins.
Also, in the Scarecrow's final Mind Screw, the roles of the beginning of the game are reversed, and you get to control the Joker for a very short time as he walks through the asylum with Batman in tow. In Origins, you get to control him again in his multiple choice "flashback", this time as the Red Hood, the "supervillain" he used to be, in reference to The Killing Joke.
Right before that, the PA announcer asks if "anyone caught the game last night". Cut three years later, where Bane crashes a football game...explosively.
In addition, the PlayStation 3-exclusive Joker DLC has the Melee Challenge Maps in which the Clown Prince of Crime you control has lethal laughing gas, a revolver handgun, and the joy buzzer as special attacks, while he uses his impressive hand-to-hand abilities to punch, slap, kick, and poke out eyes. In Origins, you get to do the same hand-to-hand abilities as in Asylum's Melee Challenge Maps while you fight as the Joker in the Comedy Club flashback.
When Batman first meets Poison Ivy, she asks him to release her so she can help him combat the Big Bad and save her plants. Come Arkham Knight, Batman has her released from prison, works with her to fight the main villain, and he ends up saving her plants.
The final Scarecrow hallucination has your game seemingly crash before restarting. Fast forward to Arkham Knight, where the Scarecrow is the main vilain, and the game is extremely buggy, especially on PC.
At one point, Harley suggests Gordon to dye his hair. Come Batman: Arkham Knight, it seems that Gordon didn't hate the idea.
A riddle that references Penguin: "A top hat and tails is the only dress code for this party in the North". Considering who voices him in the sequels...
Many people have pointed out that Scarecrow using a glove with syringes in this game makes him look like Freddy Krueger. Krueger himself, Robert Englund, would voice Scarecrow in Injustice 2 eight years later.
In Mega Man Legends 2, Teisel Bonne maintains that he and his family are pirates, not barbarians; by not taking the toilet paper from hapless citizens. At the start of the lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US, some people were hoarding toilet paper; and Teisel already knows too well what to call them.
Clam Man: The octopus bartender in the first game, released in 2019, threatens to punch Clam Man for annoying him at least twice. Research in late 2020 showed that octopuses in the wild really do punch fish with their tentacles, apparently just to get the fish to back off. No word on whether they do it to clams too, though.
This moment from the end of the Kickstarter video becomes a bit funnier, considering how the Kickstarter campaign met its funding goal in under an hour.
Laylee: Can we get out yet, Yooka? We've been in here for ages!
Yooka: Not until we reach our stretch goals, Laylee! Sit tight!
In an interview with Kirkhope, the main reason for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts' major genre shift was because a Microsoft executive said that people wouldn't be interested in 3-D platformers any longer and wanted something different. Taking a look at how the Kickstarter took off, while Nuts & Bolts tanked in sales, that executive could not have been any more wrong.
Sign: I'd love to offer directions but unfortunately I can't see behind my own head. If only I had a pair of wheels... Maybe the final game will have a fun vehicle building mechanic?
One of the loading screen messages states that "If cartridges were still popular, this level would've loaded by now!" Good thing there's a cartridge-based system among the platforms this game is being released on!
In the first game, released in 2017, one of Yooka's abilities is farting out a large bubble that encompasses him and Laylee so they can walk and breathe underwater. Scientific research in 2021 found that the anolis lizard actually does blow bubbles to help it breathe underwater. The bubbles come from its mouth or nose, though.
Morty Maxwell, who debuted in Midnight Rescue in 1989, is a brown-haired Mad Scientist. Rick and Morty, released in 2013, is about a brown-haired boy named Morty who goes on adventures with a Mad Scientist. Now comparisons between this series' Morty and Rick and Morty's Morty are pretty common nowadays, with people making jokes like "Looks like Morty grew up to be just like Rick."
As seen here, it is possible for the AI in Spellbound to misspell "bench" as "binch". Little did the creators realize that a decade or two later, "binch" would become a slang word, usually defined as a sillier form of "bitch".
The Running Gag of Morty telling his robots about the projectiles they can throw at the Super Solver, only for the robots to throw them at Morty, brings to mind a line from "We Are Number One", a LazyTown song that debuted in 2014:
"Throw it at him, not me!"
Ketsui was released in 2003 and the title officially translates to "Determination". Undertale, a game with Bullet Hell elements too, was released in 2015 and "determination" is one of its Arc Words.
In 1988, a small video game developing team known as Arc System Works, developed a port of Double Dragon for the Master System. In 2015, ASW acquires all of Technos assets via Million.
Cosmic Carnage, an obscure fighting game released in 1994, features a ninja named Naruto as one of its playable characters.
The premise of the DOS flight simulator Corncob 3D takes place in an Alternate History in 1938 when World War II never happened following Adolf Hitler's death in childhood and aliens take over the planet, with an F4U Corsair the only fighter able to defeat them. It's very similar to that of Strike Witches, which also took place in a World War II alternate history involving aliens.
Mission Craft, a top-down shooter fangame based on and using sprites and assets from Starcraft predates the top-down shooter minigame "The Lost Viking" featured in Starcraft II Wings Of Liberty by many years.
The 1987 arcade game Skull & Crossbones featured a stage set in a Japanese castle, leading to probably the first recorded instance of pirates versus ninjas, decades before it became an Internet meme.
UFO features road robots warning about group wanting to separate Pluto from the rest of the solar system. This was done before Pluto lost its status as a planet.
The Wizzards centers around a group of wizards who suspect there is a traitor among them and said traitor is different every time a new game is started. It’s is oddly similar to Among Us. In the Romanian dub, the traitor even uses the word "sus".
In Captain Nemo is minigame where you need to swim through a tight tunnels which touch means instant death with only option to go up while constantly going ahead. Sounds familiar?
One of the fictional animals in Uncle Albert's Magical Album (1998) is a yellow ladybug with blue dots connected by lines. Pokémon Sword and Shield (2019) would later introduce Dottler, a Pokémon who looks like a yellow ladybug whose dots turn blue when it uses its powers and which are connected by lines.
Knuckle Heads: Gregory Darrell is a guy dressed as a Viking and the music accompanying his stage (Link here for those interested) has some techno beats to it. So, would it be fair to say that Darrell was a technoviking before the meme came into existence in 2006?
There's a series of Formula OnePS1 games from the late 1990s that start at Formula 1 then go up to Formula One 97, then Formula One 98, then Formula One 99...which the 2023 game F-Zero 99 has nothing to do with.
This video for the Total DramaLicensed Game "Take the Crown" has the final 4 consisting of Wayne, Priya, Caleb, and Zee, with Wayne as the winner. The game and the video itself were released during the break between the first half and the second half of the 2023 series. In the second half, the final 4 is the same if you replace Zee with Julia and the winner is indeed Wayne. Furthermore, Priya and Caleb, who are sitting next to each other in the video, become an Official Couple.
Prehistoric Kingdom: Prior to the launch of Early Access, the devs confirmed there would be three skins for Tyrannosaurus, as well as a fourth skin representing Tarbosaurus. Around the time the game finally went into Early Access, a paper was written that suggested that Tyrannosaurus rex should actually be split into three seperate species — T. rex, T. regina, and T. imperator.
