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"You Win! Advance to Level 7!"
-Life
"POINTS!"
Note: Not to be confused with the game of the same name. Or the song by Buckner & Garcia.
For whatever reason, video games seen on TV never evolved past a very primitive state. Classic 8-bit games (such as Pac-Man), 2D graphics, synthetic sound and music, and pixelated graphics are bleeding-edge technology.
In live action, standard practice is to render bleeping Arcade Sounds, and bounce a shifting light pattern off the characters playing. In animation, actual game graphics can be rendered, but they are seldom very sophisticated.
Characters talking about video games will similarly seem out of touch. Game environments are referenced as numbered "levels", even though only a few games still use this linear nomenclature. Likewise, the goal of every game is to earn as many points as possible, but this style of gameplay became increasingly rare between the early Nintendo days and the days of achievements. Games also seldom have storylines, and if they do they're excuse plots like "save the galaxy from aliens". Even old Atari-style Joystick controllers still show up, periodically. Video games are also capable of starting up the moment the system is turned on. The player does not get to choose any options for the game, but is immersed in it immediately.
Furthermore, any character playing video games on TV must mash the buttons randomly as quickly as possible. This phenomenon stems from the widely held misconception among non-gamers that mastering a video game is largely a matter of learning to push buttons as fast as possible. Of course, for the vast majority of games, this simply isn't true.
This trope has many root causes. First of all, in animation the characters are already primitive, so it makes sense the video game characters would be even more so. Second, video games directly compete with TV as a time sink, so taking the expense of making them appear as attractive as contemporary games could theoretically hurt ratings. But most of all, though, a large portion of the audience (and the writers) simply grew up with old games with royalty-free bloops and bleeps (see Small Reference Pools).
Often when a title is a Game Within A Game, this is either an excuse to put in an old-style game to parody the games of yore, (the shmup in No More Heroes) an entire embedded old game, usually as a Shout Out to itself or its developers( Donkey Kong 64 contained both the original DK and Jet Pac) or simply a way to make the in-game game not look like the real game.
There is another, more straightforward reason for sound specifically being rendered in 8-bit beeps; actual games have realistic sounds intended to immerse the player (and anyone else nearby) in the game environment. Of course, if you're writing a TV show, you don't really want that — you want viewers paying attention to the people playing the game, not the game itself. Realistic explosions, battle cries, music, and so on coming from the game would distract the audience; so everything is reduced to 8-bit beeps that won't get in the way. (For this reason, you'll often see games with realistic graphics but 8-bit sounds.) Even if it isn't, it's filtered so as to sound like it's coming out of really cheap speakers. Actual modern videogame music in particular is almost never present, since it would end up setting the mood for the scene in a way that the writers probably do not intend.
On the flip side, many people who grew up with the primitive games now play the new ones as adults, so more and more of the audience can be expected to play and enjoy modern games. That's why this trope is less common in anime, due to the cultural Japanese technophilia. In fact, many developers have taken to completely ignoring children as an audience altogether. It's also commonly averted when the parent company is trying to cross-sell the games of its wholly owned subsidiary. Coupled with the falling cost of high-performance graphics technology, and this trope may be on the outs. In its place, welcome Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000.
Note that, for many of these examples, the characters could theoretically have a system that's modded to emulate classic games or use a different kind of controller or somesuch. However, unless this is explicitly pointed out, we can assume it's a mistake.
Somewhat related are all the stock "car chase explosion" sounds coming out of the television when a character is watching an action show, or the "completely random funny sound effects and expressive music, never mind if it doesn't match the onscreen action at all" when the character is watching cartoons. If you're too young to remember what Pac-Man was like on the 2600, check this out. And this for good measure.
A reason for this might be that getting the rights to use non-stock sounds for video games, and even the screens of the games themselves could cause some copyright infringements.
Pushed far enough, can lead to Schizo Tech.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Done deliberately in Arcade Gamer Fubuki. Fubuki's first opponent plays a joystick game while wearing boxing gloves.
- A fairly obscure example lies in the sole english-subbed episode of Kyou Kara Ore Wa!, where at one point, the main character is waiting for someone, and playing early Game Boy shooter Solar Striker, complete with actual footage. However, the sounds are your generic random bleeps and bloops as opposed to the actual (bleeping and blooping) soundtrack.
Film
- In Charlies Angels, two boys are shown playing Final Fantasy VIII, a one-player game. Furthermore, they're just randomly mashing buttons... during a battle cutscene. While Pac-Man music plays, no less. And they're playing it on a Dreamcast. This, friends, is what the Video Game Age Ghetto looks like.
- Oh, and to make this a real Wall Banger? Charlie's Angels was produced by Columbia Pictures. Which is a subsidiary of... wait for it... SONY.
- The video game-themed movie Grandma's Boy avoids most of these pitfalls and even subverts them (ex: you do hear the requisite whoops and beeps in one scene, but that's because they're playing Frogs and Flies on the Atari 2600), but still makes references to numbered levels, even when discussing fighting games and RPGs, two genres which seldom if ever feature numbered levels. And let's not get started on the improbability of a game designer only having one copy of a game he created.
- RP Gs usually do have numbered levels, just not the same kind.
- The films Rumble in the Bronx and Airheads featured cartridgeless Sega Game Gear consoles. Rumble in the Bronx was particularly amusing, as the wheel-chair bound kid exclaims while playing the cartridge -and battery-less Game Gear: "Thank you for the game, uncle Jackie!"
- As does the movie Surf Ninjas, though there it was a bit of a plot point.
- Two friends of the title character in The 40 Year-Old Virgin play Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance by flailing randomly on N64 controllers (a system it wasn't on). One character is even manipulating both the directional pad and the directional stick.
- In Elephant, one of the characters who shoots up his school plays a game in which he shoots several identical people in the desert. (The people seem to resemble the characters from Gerry, Gus Van Sant's previous film, about two guys who get lost in a desert.) The point of the game seems to be to shoot people who don't do anything but walk around.
- Live Free or Die Hard has dozens of computers but no mice; at one point, the actor who played a heroic hacker reached for the area where a mouse should have been. On the other hand, the intro to the movie quite clearly shows several of the hackers playing Gears of War, and one of Warlock's many screens has the same game paused on it.
- The movie Jarhead has a few lines of dialogue referring to levels in Metroid, and that if you reach the tenth level, nothing happens, you just start at the beginning again. Erm, no. Unlike games broken into levels, Metroid Vania games are the poster child for Sequence Breaking.
- Training Day: A kid plays on a Dreamcast controller while stock 70s Arcade sound effects play in the background.
- In Return of the Living Dead 3, a group of thugs are playing what's clearly Street Fighter II in a convenience store, yet it makes sounds like a 70s arcade game.
- In the live-action Transformers (2007), Glen's cousin is playing Dance Dance Revolution; when Glen enters, he asks what level he's on, and the reply is "Six!" (Level 6 songs in DDR included ".59" and "Healing Vision" on Standard or "Max 300" on Light, prior to the expansion from 10 to 18 levels in DDR X.) Then Glen pauses the game and asks his cousin to leave the room, and the reply is "Well, save my game!" (Unlike Amplitude, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band, DDR doesn't have pause.)
- Inside Man went the opposite extreme. A kid plays an ersatz Grand Theft Auto PSP game. When we see clips, the game's graphics are too advanced for the PSP, especially since at the time Sony had the CPU speed slowed down to preserve battery life. This has since been lifted.
- La Maquina de Bailar (The Dance Machine) was a film made in Spain where the plot involved a nobody winning a Dance Dance Revolution tournament in order to pay off a debt. Even with offical endorsement from Konami, many "liberties" were taken with the game - mainly that each player's whacked-out dancing didn't even attempt to correspond with the arrows onscreen (which, when shown, displayed a stepchart from another song...at the lowest difficulty...and repeatedly missing steps.) Not to mention that the best way to train for a DDR tournament is to take a ballet class (as opposed to playing the game instead.) Small wonder that it placed fourth its premiere weekend, falling behind the Spanish version of the cinematic masterpiece, Are We Done Yet?
- The low-budget horror film How to Make a Monster was obviously written by someone who had no knowledge of video game development, or video games in general. A triple-A title game is being created by three programmers and a producer. Now that's an efficient developer. The programmers are in charge of "AI," "Weapons" (?), and "Music." Those are apparently the only three components to a video game. No art, no design, etc. Further, the programmers work in isolation from each other and in competition, as the best aspect of the game will earn the corresponding programmer $1 million. Sounds like a good business model. When we see footage of the industry-conquering game they're creating, it's a generic first person shooter that is years behind the times. To be fair, it does look like something three guys with poor teamwork might be able to create in a few days.
- Grosse Point Blank features a kid playing an arcade game in a convenience store, but the game he's playing is Doom II, which was never officially turned into an arcade game.
- Enemy Of The State - The main character gets in trouble because he has a sensitive video file saved onto a PCMCIA memory card and he is able to watch the video on a media player shaped just like a... TurboGrafx-16 TurboExpress? Not only is the TurboExpress unable to communicate with PCMCIA but there's no way it could play video files, either.
- In Beethoven, there's a scene where the brother and older sister are playing Super Mario Bros. 3 together. As in simultaneously mashing buttons on their controllers, even though the footage shown indicates that they're not playing one of the "versus games" that actually allows simultaneous play. Plus, if memory serves correctly, the brother is wearing the Mattel Power Glove but uses his free hand on the "standard controller" button setup that's built into the glove.
- Meet Dave has an extremely stupid example. The titular alien plays against a kid in what appears to something similar to F Zero on a PS 2. The kid seems to be playing correctly, but Dave just taps his fingers over the controller like a mad man, and kicks the kid's ass in the game. Granted, he's an alien unfamiliar with human video games, but there is no way that Button Mashing on crack could help you in any racing game at all, as they don't require combos. If it were a fighting game, this might've been funny, but in a racing game it looks stupid.
- In Homeward Bound, the kids are playing Star Tropics 2 together and the stepdad asks who's winning. The actual game is single-player; the NES didn't have enough video memory for co-op RP Gs.
- To be fair, the movie came out around 1993, which is close to said game's release date, so this may have just been a case of Did Not Do The Research.
- Don't forget the horrific Police Academy: Mission To Moscow. Not only do various characters in the movie sport cartridgeless Game Boys (of the black and white variety - the color models didn't come out until 4 years later), but videos of the game in action are blatantly shot on a PC monitor, in color!
- In the Hulk Hogan movie, Suburban Commando, there is a section where a kid and Hulk Hogan's character play the videogame Afterburner all while randomly yelling nonsensical crap about some space alien and phasers despite showing us some gameplay footage that shows none of those. They're also playing it very wrong.
- It's obviously an Afterburner cabinet, but they at least don't show what's on screen. Oh, and Hogan totally beats the game, as in "he defeats it and makes it surrender."
- The brief scene supposedly parodying Grand Theft Auto in Meet The Spartans: Leonidas starts running in very jerky motions as he steals a car, soundtracked by 8 bit-esque sound effects and music. Although this is Seltzer And Friedberg we're talking about here...
Live Action TV
- Law And Order Special Victims Unit created a game called IntenCity, an obvious Grand Theft Auto ripoff, to create a far-out story about games causing prostitute murder — Ripped From The Headlines, depending on who one asks. The game was 3D, but extremely lousy-looking. And short, for when the suspects were asked to play the game in order to measure their brain activity, the same 10 seconds of game footage was looped over and over, broken by close-ups of the suspect.
- SVU, again, featured an episode centered around a fairly typical hack-and-slash dungeon crawler... and then subverted this trope like mad. The characters refer to the game having "levels", but use it to refer to levels of the game and the game hero's character level interchangeably, which does actually make way more sense than you'd expect. The sound effects correspond to the gameplay being shown — clashing swords, monster noises, and a triumphant horn chorus straight from EverQuest for leveling up — and it's Captain Cragen, the eldest cast member, who discovers a talent for the game and actually manages to beat it, and then uses their shared love of the game to talk to the main suspect, a kid who's obsessed with the game and has a bit of trouble telling fantasy from reality. Oh, and in one final subversion, the kid didn't do it. He was roleplaying the hero and tried to save the girl.
- Married With Children has one episode with a nerd playing an original Game Boy, mashing the buttons while arcade noises sound. When the Game Boy is broken, he pulls a second one out of his pants, immediately playing it with the same sound effects.
- In the Everybody Loves Raymond episode "Homework", Ray and Robert are playing a fictional generic zombie FPS on PlayStation 2 (mashing buttons and all). Interestingly, a few minutes later, Robert picks up the console and leaves, and we can clearly see that it was not even hooked up to the TV.
- House reprehensibly abuses this trope in one episode by showing House playing Metroid Zero Mission on his Game Boy Advance SP... however, despite going close-up on the GBA screen several times, you very pointedly hear Pac-Man bleeps and bloops. He also makes the same mistake as in Jarhead of referring to numbered levels in a Metroid Vania. Maybe people just associate 2D with levels.
- If you want to get really technical, the visuals suffer from a similar but extremely specific form of "Wrong for the sake of accessibility". In game, main character Samus can roll into a ball and download maps from statues. However, makers of the episode decided that the image of Samus being held in the claws of a big alien thing worked better as something recognizably negative (despite being something the player has to do to progress), complete with an "Oh, that's gotta hurt!" reaction shot from House.
- Nevermind the fact that several hours of playing doesn't seem to advance House beyond the first thirty seconds of gameplay.
- In another episode, House holds up a Nintendo DS to a patient's ear to see if he can hear it. While it is quite clearly playing the Morph Ball time trial from Metroid Prime Hunters (without any input from a player, interestingly enough), we hear the stock sound effects. Maybe the writers are Metroid fans, but the sound effects guys think it's just Pac-Man with better graphics.
- During season 2 (if I recall correctly), House is shown in his office playing MX vs. ATV on his PSP, and apart from the fact he's just trying to crash into a wall instead of completing laps, the sound effects are the motor sounds from the game, the music is just cut.
- In season 3, the autistic kid hooked to his PSP is playing what looks either like a Game Gear/Master System game or a bad GBA homebrew with acid colors about a ferret bursting into flames, with the required bleep-bloops and spaztic button mashing.
- In a recent episode, this is done slightly less poorly: House is playing Ninja Gaiden II on an Xbox 360 with realistic sounds and button inputs. The only problem is that House seems to think that his goal is to kill the protagonist Ryu. Admittedly, as antisocial as House is, one could see him play a game just to kill the main character. It'd help if he was using the left stick and not the d-pad, though.
- Well, considering Ninja Gaiden's reputation, House could've just given up trying to progress and just try to find new ways to die.
- On an episode in the 5th season of Angel, Spike is playing a game that's implied to be the original Donkey Kong, making comments such as "Gorilla with barrels" and "Stupid plumber!", yet he is clearly holding an Xbox controller. And we doubt that Joss Whedon has heard of homebrew.
- Later in that same season, Illyria and Drogan are shown playing the same system while the rest of the heroes are away, and making bemused remarks to one another about the gameplay that clearly suggest they're playing a Crash Bandicoot game. What sounds do we hear coming from the unseen television screen? Pac-Man beeps and whistles.
- In an episode of Lost, Walt is seen playing a Game Boy. He then tells his father, Michael that it needs new batteries. However, it's a Game Boy Advance SP, which can only use the included rechargeable battery. You'd think that the kid would've said something to the director, until you realize that lithium ion batteries have only a few hundred charge cycles before they don't hold a charge as long.
- Bizarrely, this was averted just a few episodes earlier in "The Greater Good", where a pair of people play what is clearly shown to be Half Life-they even discuss what enemies the crowbar works well on.
- Somewhat related: Much later on, an older Aron watches a cartoon about a train, and we hear train sound effects and music. Then the camera aims at the television and we see a cat and a dog arguing in a Chuck Jones cartoon. The hell?
- In one episode of ER, Dr. Kovač buys a brand new console. This is not only treated as a ridiculous and silly indulgence for a grown man and a sign of his deteriorating moral character, but features him mashing buttons to the same stock bloop-bloop arcade sounds.
- The Australian soap opera Neighbours became infamous among schoolkids of the 90s for frequently showing one of the children playing a Nintendo Game Boy with no cartridge installed. This wasn't possible until Nintendo introduced the Game Boy Advance in 2001, which could load a game into RAM from another GBA or a GameCube.
- This happened again in 2008. The child in question was still playing an old-style Game Boy.
- Harry Enfield's Kevin the teenager sketch starts as a sweet kid who spontaneously turns into a stereotypical teenager. On his thirteenth birthday, he opens a present and pulls out a Game Boy. He exclaims that "Mario Kart is babyish!" Heaven knows why, as Mario Kart wasn't on the Game Boy until Mario Kart Super Circuit for Game Boy Advance.
- This gets even more ridiculous when you know that Super Mario Kart, the first game in the series, was released three years AFTER the Game Boy.
- Done by Feedback on Who Wants To Be A Superhero. Despite his superhero identity getting his powers from video games, when asked to name his favorite game, he said Pong. However, he also mentions the Prince Of Persia series, which is still going strong, so this may just be a nostalgia thing. (Or maybe he's just well aware of this trope.)
- In two separate episodes of Roseanne, an SNES is clearly being played, complete with actual sounds and music from the game Super Mario World and using the SNES controller realistically. However, both times the games is misidentified. Mark states the game deals with "skulls and blood" while Roseanne makes a comment about saving a monkey princess, two things definitely not in Super Mario World. (There are skull rafts and blood-red lava in the Vanilla Dome; this may have lead to the confusion.) To top it off, the music in at least one of these episodes was from the game's title screen, which never occurs anywhere else in the game.
- Interestingly, there exists a pirated NES version of Super Mario World.
- The latest season of Scrubs features Turk and playing a game on the Xbox 360. The footage seen is from Unreal Tournament, but the show doesn't seem to be to get facts straight on anything, with the dialogue sounding more like they are playing Halo. Particularly hilarious is when Carla turns out to be the best player, but her actress obviously doesn't know how to hold the controller.
- Worst of all, the characters all explicitly mention that they are playing co-op mode on the same machine, but the screen clearly shows single-player mode in progress.
- "Oh Ms. Pac-man, I would sex that bow right off your head. Eat those dots you naughty, naughty girl."
- Life had an episode where the victim was tied to drug dealing, and the detectives figure out that he managed to store files pertaining to the crime on his Xbox. So they get the victim's sister, who they see making vaguely controller-like fiddly motions in the air for no good reason, to play through Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones until she gets to Level 10, which unlocks the files. Never minding the fact that the game itself doesn't have numbered levels, the people behind the show just decided to hack up footage from the game and randomly stick "level" screens between them to denote progress. View the idiocy here.
- Also note that not only is that Xbox not turned on, it's not even hooked up to the television.
- In an episode of some Disney TV show (Hannah Montana or That's So Raven), two people were playing a video game together. One person had a GameCube controller, and the other had an Xbox 360 controller. True, a PC can use both 360 controllers and USB-adapted GCN controllers, but it's unlikely that was the case.
- In a 2001 episode of the BBC children's television program WATCH!, two kids play Super Smash Bros. Melee (which had only just been released) on a "PlayStation" (actually a GameCube).
- A truly atrocious example appeared in an episode of CSI Miami, where a group of killers was linked to a GTA-esque game. Apart from the usual errors regarding "points" and "levels", the detectives determine that the killers are basing their actions on the game's plot. They ask the (fortunately local) game developer for details of the plot. Said developer refuses to tell them the game's plot, citing it as a "trade secret", and states that they will have to play the game to learn the plot, which they do. Apparently, no one involved with the show has ever so much as walked into a video game store, with prominent shelves of strategy guides proclaiming "all secrets revealed!" Or heard of GameFAQs.
- If that wasn't enough, at the beginning of the episode a group of kids rob a bank with uzis, and one of them was shot by Delko after he tried to rape a woman for "extra points". It was later revealed they specifically picked a bank with a cop present (again, for extra points), the PR guy (yes, there was only one) encouraged them (and provided the uzis) to do it for advertising purposes, one of the suspects was found to have "gamed himself to death", and the token Girl Gamer apparently did it to get in with the highly elitist gamers.
- An episode of Will And Grace has Grace attempt to play Dance Dance Revolution across the top four of the eight buttons (it was a two-player machine). Then Jack starts dancing on the machine without any regard for the dancepad as if it registers that way. This would count as an aversion, as neither of them seem to do very well on the machine, except that the arrows still only scroll down the left side, so clearly someone didn't understand.
- Episode 6 of Dexter has his girlfriend's son pick up a PS 2 controller and start playing what appears to be Doom with Pac-Man sounds over the background music from Space Invaders.
- A Season 3 episode has the titular Anti Villain playing the PC version of Halo multiplayer... with completely foreign sound effects, including gunfire right out of Atari and an enemy "death rattle" akin to sound effects from Tron.
- A Step by Step episode had the family's stereotypically nerdy son becoming a "video game addict," complete with an ending where he goes to a support group and has a psychotic episode in which he angrily screams "I ALWAYS GET THE HIGHEST SCORE!!!" before breaking down and admitting he has a problem. The game which drives his addiction (indeed the only game he seems to have ever played) is a generic looking Galaga doppelganger which was outdated looking even for the show's time.
- There's a video poker machine in multiple episodes of Sliders that produces Pitfall sound effects.
- In Stargate Atlantis, Weir distracts Dr. Lee by talking to him about World Of Warcraft. This is before the first Expansion Pack, The Burning Crusade, came out, and he claims to have the beta. Let us count the problems with this conversation:
- How could Dr. Lee, no matter how clueless, think that someone who had been LIVING IN ANOTHER GALAXY for a few years could possibly be playing an MMO during that time?
- The Beta wasn't available yet.
- He claimed his character was level 75. The Burning Crusade raised the level cap from 60 to 70.
- He says that he plays a Mage who's spec is "engineering and duelling"; um, engineering's a profession and duelling kinda happens, a mage's spec would be fire, frost, arcane, or a mix.
- Weir, who doesn't know the game, says that her character's race is a mage, and Lee doesn't catch on. Mage is a class, people.
- I'm not sure just what to say about him trying to "increase his enchanter skill" and that it's "not going well." Yeah...
- Two And A Half Men - Jake talks about getting his Game Boy taken away from him in school, and when he finally gets it back... it turns out to be a Nintendo DS.
- In another episode, Jake mentions that he wants to get the "new Final Fantasy game", and when he goes to a video store and gets the game, it turns out to be Final Fantasy X. Not only was the game about three years old at the airing of the episode, it clearly had the red Greatest Hits logo. And when he got home and started to play it, 8-bit music from Final Fantasy II could be heard.
- Malcolm In The Middle - Mortal Kombat was discussed, and was being played on an actual console that had a version of MK on it. Although there aren't really levels in vs fighter games, just opponents that use harder AI later in a game. Also Sub-Zero has never been a final boss.
Dad: Because that's just ridiculous. No one beats Sub-Zero!
- He could have been referring to Sub-Zero being a hard enemy in general, so that even reaching the last boss was preposterous. Of course, the whole instant special moves deal combined with the MK Walker makes Sub-Zero pretty tough in the first place.
- It's extremely possible they were refering to 1997's Mortal Kombat Mythologies: Sub-Zero which actually had levels.
- Except in that game, you played as Sub-Zero, so him being unbeatable wouldn't effect whether or not the game could be beaten.
- Chappelles Show went recursive, with the narrator calling "You give me Pac-Man Fever!" a hilarious video game joke. Not to mention when he claims to know about gamers and the Playstation 2s, which he proved by doing a live-action GTA spoof with 8-bit sound effects.
- Borja, the main character from Spanish sitcom Que Vida Mas Triste, has as one of his main traits being a gamer, so videogames are brought often on the plot. And they manage to fall into this trope Every. Single. Time. A small sample:
- Borja buying Resident Evil 5 months before it was even released on Japan. Tame, but not the only one related to RE 5, see below:
- Another episode has a character of the day read a cheat for RE 5 that went "Press X + Y for infinite Chainsaw". Leaving aside things like RE 5 not having a chainsaw as an usable weapon or that such an INCREDIBLY simple cheat would never be on something like a RE game (Or 99% of modern games period), Borja only owns a Play Station 3, which lacks a "Y" button...
- And yet another episode has Borja downloading a hacked RE 5 game that replaces the zombies by Chinese people (uh...). The problem isn't that hack doesn't exist, it's that he describes it as "killing Chinese guys all the time, over and over!".
- Speaking of his system of choice, an entire episode is dedicated to Borja buying an X Box 360 and getting really hooked with it... yet it's always called a X Box, no "360", even though they show it and they reference the Red Ring of Death. Did they think adding the "360" would make our heads explode?
- One episode has him and Josebas wanting to play Mega Man 9 together, except it's an one-player game. Worse, Borja picks the game and takes it to play home. The problem? Mega Man 9 is a DOWNLOADABLE game. And no, he didn't pick up the console, though that would have been funny.
- Another episode has Borja talking about hard Alex Kidd 3 was and how nobody beat it, then he does it. Leaving aside how the third Alex Kidd game was a Japan-only Master System videogame and he was playing on a Mega Drive (Genesis for Americans), this turns out to be nothing but an Excuse Plot to give Borja superpowers for beating the game. Specifically, Alex Kidd's superpowers, which apparently are... Superstrength, Superspeed and Psychokinesis. Alex Kidd has nothing like that. They should've just made-up the game's name, since they made-up all other details anyway...
- Near the end of the Whole Plot Reference episode parodying Back To The Future (Where they said it was like BttF over and over), Borja gives in the past a piece of paper to his father, telling him "If you ever have a son, buy him this on Christmas: A NES in 1980, a Super Nintendo in 1981, a Play Station in 1982....". This is too obvious to explain it, but here it goes: None of these consoles existed at the years he was asking for them (For example, the NES, by far the oldest, came in 1983. In Japan. In Europe, where this show is located, came in 1987.) So Yeah.
- A episode has Borja playing a Dance Dance Revolution rip-off. They show the Game Over screen... And it looks like it came from an early, crappy 16-bit game. And he was playing on his Play Station 3. To add insult to the injury, there were Arcade Sounds. On a series that uses actual video game sounds (From 8-bit games like Super Mario Bros, but eh) on its Idiosyncratic Wipes.
- But the one taking the crown was the episode where Borja claims he can see life like a videogame (Just like Konata! Only worse.) The episode delves into several video game parodies, that, well...
- First is a fighting game that looks like Street Fighter but uses the Mortal Kombat sounds, fatality included. They could have just used the Mortal Kombat interface for that.
- Second is Borja moving in Super Mario Bros 3's World-1 Map, with houses on top of the various worlds, to represent him going around town trying to buy a gift for his Love Interest and going drinking instead. Logic says they should've used an RPG for that (Like Earthbound, since it has "modern-day" graphics), but nobody plays RPGs in Spain.
- Third was a discussion with another guy parodying Monkey Island. This Troper has never played those games but it looked accurate, so we'll give it a pass for now.
- But the one proving the writers know nothing about videogames (Or think we don't) was the last one: Borja trying to get the aforementioned Love Interest to fall in love with him, or at least to get in bed with her. What should that be? Why, a Dating Sim, right? Or maybe a Visual Novel? Those would've fitted and would've been awesome. But instead, they used... The Sims. The fucking Sims. For dating. What. The. Hell.
- And with all of this in mind...: One episode has the gall of being about Borja concluding he knows a lot about videogames (which leads to him making one with Josebas). If there was a trope for "Unintended Hypocritical Humor", this example would be there (The fact said game was a Beat Em Up, a genre that was big on the early nineties but now it's fading into obscurity, doesn't helps matters either).
- At the end of an episode of Murphy Brown, Murphy mentions that she and Frank still haven't beaten Mario 3. The scene comes so painfully close to inverting this trope: they both pick up NES controllers and when the game starts up, neither of them hammer on the buttons. But alas, the music that plays is not of Mario 3 at all, but instead that of Super Mario World.
Music
- Herman Li, guitarist for Dragonforce, often slips Pac-Man-esque wails into his songs, referring to them in interviews as "video game sound effects". You can also see the trope in action in the band's music video for Operation Ground and Pound. Note that both guitarists are actually gamers, the sequence was their idea, and Li actually owns the TurboGrafx-16 seen in the video.
- Being a seasoned gamer and a lover of the classics, Lupe Fiasco purposely invokes the trope in his music video for "I Gotcha", in which he is briefly shown sitting on a couch playing Pong, 80s one-button joystick and all.
- In the song "Go Go Gadget Flow" : "All me, no ghost no 16-bit like Sega GENESIS."
- He mentions Atari a lot in his songs. Like in "Go Baby": But we go back like a set of Ataris...from baby fat til we skeletons, darling...me starring you is what it says on the marquee, so lets go give 'em a show!"
- In Chamillionaire's "Ridin'" video, the lyric goes, "Next to this new chic she like cola, next to the PlayStation controller." But the controller seen in the girl's hand is clearly an Xbox controller. See it here (at 0:50).
Video Games
- No More Heroes is notable for being a video game that actually uses Pac Man Fever; it mixes exaggeratedly vintage video game beeps, chimes, and graphics with the more modern stuff.
- God Hand does the same thing, but to a significantly lesser extent.
- Justified in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and San Andreas, which take place in the late eighties and early nineties respectively.
- Kinda-sorta justified in Bully, though, since the game seems to take place in modern times, but all the arcade games are 80s-esque because they're cheap (the school), stolen (the clubhouses), or nostalgic (the comic book shop).
- Complete Me And My Katamari, and you'll be taken to an 8-bit minigame with a blooping version of "Katamari on the Rock", with the King commenting entertainingly on the graphics.
- Doom 3 uses this trope. Apparently Twenty Minutes Into The Future on Mars, the only games available involve punching turkeys to death.
- The "Void Quest" dungeon in Persona 4 has wall textures, sound effects and a graphics style that appear as though is an NES era jRPG (even if it is in the same 3d as the rest of the game). Yosuke acctually notes that it is "retro". The boss of the dungeon even attacks using the menu from the original Shin Megami Tensei
- Each of the main Pokémon games feature Nintendo's current home console in the player's room. However, due to the gap between the Japanese and English releases, the English version of Red and Blue featured a SNES, even though the games were released after the N64. This made even less sense in those games' GBA remakes, FireRed and LeafGreen, in which the hero(ine) has an NES (as it's basically product placement for discontinued products).
- GBA also had Classic NES Series, budget Game Paks that ran an old NES game in an emulator.
Web Original
- In one lonelygirl15 video, the hopelessly geeky Hollywood Nerd is giving all the "regular" characters training. For the Playful Hacker who is the only one who finds him Beautiful All Along, it is revealed that her training is in... what's this? Frogger? Centipede? Aren't these... video games? How is this training?! But, as he is a Trickster Mentor, this is shown to be just what they needed to give them the edge. Of course, playing is done by holding a Jakks Pacific TV Game, a self-contained AA battery-powered device with only composite inputs for televisions, up in front of a (shown from behind) laptop and saying "Look out for the ghost! Turn right! OH MY GOD!"
- Homestar Runner intentionally uses this trope, as Strong Bad seems to have an outdated understanding of technology. He regularly references Atari and NES-style games as if they were the latest thing. However, references to later systems such as the Sega Genesis and the Nintendo 64 have appeared in the series.
Web Comic
Western Animation
- Kim Possible defines video gaming as a favorite pastime of several characters, but all the games depicted on-screen are extremely old-fashioned. The only exception is a sophisticated MMORPG called "Everlot", which is at the center of a whole episode's plot; scenes in the game are rendered in a different style but not a noticeably primitive one.
- Futurama hangs a lampshade on this, with characters playing a dead ringer for the original Game Boy with Arcade Sounds... in the year 3000.
- Early in the first Jimmy Timmy Power Hour, Timmy is seen playing a video game called "The Decimator". It's in 3D (foreshadowing the game's role to the plot, as it comes into (sorry) play in Jimmy's universe) but played on a "Game Buddy" (guess what handheld it is based on) and comes on a CD. Everything else in the screen is animated in standard Fairly Odd Parents Thick Line Animation. And speaking of the game itself, Timmy downloads the game's files into Goddard, turning him into a killer humanoid robot who blows things up to progresses through levels (in both definitions, as he grows in size and consequently, takes on tougher subjects to a point where he indirectly menaces Retroville by targeting a factory)
- Danny Phantom features Danny playing a game called "Doomed", a game that's part Tron homage, part FPS, and still (just like Doom II) uses the numbered level system. Not to mention the fact that it's a leveled online game which apparently gives the winner access to the internet, despite being online in the first place, making it the equivalent of a needlessly complicated firewall.
- The arcade game in the Rugrats episode Diapers and Dragons seems to be a sidescrolling platformer (from what's shown before we go into Deep Immersion Gaming) with Super Mario Bros style music (and the objective is, of course, Save The Princess). A bit more advanced than the usual Pac Man Fever, but still, in 2003? (And, of course, the babies are able to play it quite well by hitting buttons at random, but if the babies couldn't achieve things babies normally can't by hitting things at random, it wouldn't be Rugrats.)
- Of course, considering that no one ever ages in that show anyway (made absolutely ridiculous when baby Dil was conceived at the end of one season and born in the feature film released before the next season began — but the babies are not one year older when the new season picks up), we might presume that it's not 2003, but rather 1991, when the show debuted. At best, that's the dawn of the 16-bit era.
- One egregious example appeared on an episode of The Secret Show. Everyone was buzzing about the popular new game system, "The Hand." It was simply a vat of "nano-goo" that users dipped their hands into, causing the goo to harden around their hands and turn them into portable game systems and controllers. Despite the ludicrously advanced technology the system is based on, it makes references to linear levels and only seems to play one built-in game. Single-game consoles weren't even made between the '70s and 2001, when Jakks Pacific introduced Plug and Play TV Games.
- Partially subverted in The Venture Bros season 1, episode 10 "Are You There God? It's Me, Dean" with Pete White playing what can be inferred to be "Grand Theft Auto III", due to the graphics on screen, realistic sound effects and Pete making references to doing "a drive-by mission for the Yardies" and being able to see player stats by pressing the Start Button...on what looks like a Nintendo64 controller.
- Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends occasionally features Bloo playing a video game that looks and sounds exactly like the Atari game Asteroids, and trying to beat other people's high scores. Somewhat justified in that the world of Fosters clearly isn't the world we know, but then again, Frankie has a modern computer and they do have their own versions of eBay and YouTube.
- In an episode of Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog, Robotnik is shown fiddling with some machine controls while sounds from the first Super Mario Bros are heard. Amusing considering the console war of that time.
- The same company who made the Super Mario Bros cartoons made Ao St H, so it's pretty much justified.
Real Life
- Hard to pull off a real life example, but: Penny Arcade's stock promotional shot of the two creators deliberately invokes this tropes, showing Krahulik and Holkins flailing around on a couch, pretending to play a game. Holkins is holding a PSP as if it's a controller, which isn't so bad because some GameCube games could use a GBA as a controller, but Krahulik is holding an Xbox 360 controller upside down.
- Actually, apparently he actually DOES hold his controller upside down. Read this news post (fourth paragraph of Tycho's post).
- Look no further than the box cover of the AK Rocker gamer chair for a prime example of this: A family of three (dad, son, daughter) are all on the titular chairs playing a game together...with an Xbox, Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast controller, respectively, and the Xbox controller is being held upside-down. Of course, it also depicts another family playing games cosplaying as Vikings, so take that as you will.
- And then there's this commercial for becoming a game designer. Parodied by Three Panel Soul here.
- This news announcement about GTA4, on RAI (the Italian national broadcasting company), featuring a guy furiously mashing random buttons DURING THE TRAILER. Obviously, they're talking about the game in "Seduction of the innocents"-like terms, because GTA4 doesn't have RE4-style interactive cut scenes.
- A print commercial for Crash: Mind Over Mutant shows two kids playing the game with a Game Cube Controller. Note that when Radical Entertainment took over the Crash franchise (Mind over Mutant being their second game), the GameCube was long dead. And the Wii version of said game does not support GameCube controls.
- Fruit By The Foot once struck a promotional deal with Nintendo to put gameplay tips for Nintendo64 games on the snack's cellophane wrappers. The commercial showed two teenagers grown old, with one who's been waiting 62 years for his friend to finish playing. He's supposedly been using the snack's hints to keep from losing for all these years...but he's playing Banjo-Kazooie! If the tips are so useful, why hasn't he beaten it by now? Answer: nobody involved with this commercial got the memo that video games aren't about playing until you lose for a high score anymore, and actually have endings. It's even worse for the next commercial, where he's playing Mario Party 2, which not only has an ending, but is specifically designed to be a multiplayer game. Why can't they both play at once?
Exceptions:
Anime & Manga
- Episode 28 of Keroro Gunsou shows Natsumi playing a game that's obviously supposed to be the first Dobutsu no Mori, better known in the states as Animal Crossing. A much later episode shows kid Keroro playing what is clearly Super Mario Bros, and few episodes after that, we get one about the characters entering a RPG that is very clearly a Dragon Quest parody.
- The anime Shigofumi does a wonderful subversion of this trope. In ep 10, a young girl, obsessed with playing a very accurate—though genericized, of course—depiction of Animal Crossing, bonds with a thirty-something otaku, pondering the meaninglessness of his life after a cancer diagnosis, over the game which the otaku, in fact, designed and programmed most of. The video game is shown to be a form of communication and a means to establish a friendship, rather than the hobby of pathetic shut-ins and socially maladjusted weirdos.
- Genshiken gets around this through judicious Product Placement: the characters play real video games spliced into the animation, most notably the then-latest Guilty Gear title, Guilty Gear: Isuka. Ohno, the resident Cosplay Otaku Girl, cosplays one of the characters.
- The opening sequence, in fact, features a clip of Sol Badguy performing a simple combo... and the music is timed to match the move.
- Lucky Star's video games are often fairly accurate parodies of real games; unsurprising, since one of the main characters is a game otaku.
- The OVA goes one-up with an RPG Episode rendered in full 3D with (of course) lots of snarking about various game mechanics. For an idea of how convincing it is, just go count the number of Youtube commentors saying that they'd play it if it were real.
- Vaguely averted in Hayate The Combat Butler, where the Lampshade Hanging is Nagi deliberately trying out an old Dragon Quest lookalike (which is probably older than she is) and lacks any nostalgia factor for the old game.
- In Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (which takes place in the future), the hacker Lee Sampson seems to spend a lot of time playing updated versions of old 1980s 8-bit games. However, this is explained by Lee, who voices contempt at modern games and idealizes the games from the early days of hacking.
- In a late Manga chapter of Ranma 1/2, Ranma and his childlike teacher Hinako play what is obviously Street Fighter II on Hinako's Super Famicom, with Ranma's Ryu easily beating Hinako's Chun Li. This chapter was published circa 1994, during Street Fighter II's heyday; amusingly, several Ranma 1/2 fighting games were also released during this period.
- Ouran High School Host Club. In a flashback, the twins Hikaru and Kaoru are playing (well, one of them is playing) a game on what is clearly a Game Boy Advance—but when we see the screen, the graphics are comically low-rez, looking more like an LCD Game & Watch. In a later flashback, they're now playing on a DS.
- Maybe they were playing Game & Watch Gallery 4 on that GBA.
- Kure-nai has Murasaki playing on (and breaking) a DS, and the game is shown to be Phantom Hourglass (Though this editor thinks it looked more like Wind Waker, but pretty close).
- In one of the final chapters of the Mai Hime manga, Nagi is shown playing a DS when the heroes confront him. He's even wearing headphones and using the stylus.
- Great Teacher Onizuka is frequently seen playing a Playstation (modern when it was made), and both made reference to Wild Arms and showed footage of Ape Escape.
- Which I would like to add was being played with the original non-dualshock playstation controller Ape Escape was one of the first games to require an analog stick.
- He is also seen to be playing Resident Evil 5 in side-story Shonan 14 Days, even though the story technically happens within the continuity of the original GTO. Onizuka also owns a PSP. Somehow.
Film
- The Wizard, a film which could best be described as a 90-minute Nintendo commercial, featured genuine footage of Super Mario Bros 3 several months before its release. It still managed a number of inaccuracies, however (like saying a character's reached the third level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but showing footage from the first level, or one of the main characters getting 50,000 points in Double Dragon by mashing buttons during the opening cutscene, or the "arcade" machines often being obvious NES games), so the movie is only a partial exception.
- The arcade machines playing NES games could be Playchoice-10 machines.
- There's also the bit where someone comments on Jimmy getting so far in Ninja Gaiden without taking a hit, when the screen we see shows a couple notches off his health bar.
- He even keeps playing after Haley sets a magzine down over 90% of the screen, though that could possibly be because he's retarded.
- Similarly, in Simon Pegg's Shaun Of The Dead, playing Time Splitters (appropriately a UK-developed shooter game) on a PS2 is depicted accurately, aside from a "Player 2 has entered the game" voiceover narration added for the audience's benefit.
- Tropic Thunder had Matthew Mc Conaughey playing Wii Sports.
- Reign Over Me features Shadow Of The Colossus extensively. The original plan was to go with this trope, but the film's editor insisted on the aforementioned game, for character reasons.
- They did refer to it as "Shadows of the Colossus", however.
- The film version of Night Watch had the Big Bad predict the future using fighting games.
- The Mexican film Duck Season is very accurate in depicting two 14-year-old boys playing Halo, with the TV even announcing "Slayer", the typical versus mode in the game, as they begin. The only unrealistic detail is the improbably frequent rate, based on the sounds, at which their characters seemed to die.
- The 1996 movie, Swingers, featured the characters arguing over NHL Hockey '94 on the Genesis. They even referred to the lack of fighting in that version of the game, but that's made up for by being able to make Wayne Gretzky's head bleed.
- The actual game they were playing is NHLPA Hockey 93.
- In Disturbia, we see Shia LaBeouf play a bit of G.R.A.W., complete with accurate graphics, sound, and on an Xbox 360, one of the systems this game was released on.
- This trope is still in play, since he's playing a mission from the single-player campaign, when he's depicted as playing on Xbox Live.
- The video game horror movie Stay Alive was quite accurate in its name-dropping, likely because they hired Gears of War developer CliffyB as a consultant.
- While the game shown in the beginning of Big was fictional, it was an extremely accurate representation of a common genre of game at the time the movie was made.
- Lost In Translation has a scene set in an arcade game center in Japan; some of the games shown are Taiko no Tatsujin / Taiko Master and Pop'n Music; someone does a freestyle routine on the Pop'n machine, which this Bemani fan found impressive.
- In Four Christmases, a character is playing a game in one scene, and sounds from the classic Donkey Kong are heard... and then it is shown that he is playing with a Wii Classic Controller, meaning that he actually is playing Donkey Kong on the Virtual Console.
- The Score has the main character (Robert De Niro) phone someone who is shown playing Quake III Arena. At one point the kid pauses, so it's assumed that he's cursing bots, not humans (or the pausing would invoke this trope).
- The titular video game in Spy Kids 3D: Game Over uses levels and has no apparent storyline, but does at least look like a 21st century video game with 3D graphics and so forth. On the DVD Commentary, Robert Rodriguez says he had his sons play a lot of video games for him as research. Needless to say, this made them think he was the coolest dad ever.
- The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a documentary about Donkey Kong world records. Very obvious subversion here, with a dash of Serious Business and hot sauce.
- Towards the beginning of Zathura, the younger of the two brothers is shown playing Jak 3, not only with the relevant music and sound effects, but also showing him controlling it properly (i.e., he was actually playing the game).
- No surprise - Zathura was produced by Sony company Columbia Pictures, making this Product Placement as well.
- In one of the Three Ninjas one of the main characters is seen playing Super Mario Bros 3 on an NES in his room.
- Jim Carrey was actually taught to play DDR for this scene in Yes Man. For the more savvy players reading:
- You can see him pull off some crossovers at 13 seconds in.
- He's playing an actual DDR song, and a Konami original, to boot ("Hana Ranman," aka "Flowers")
- He's playing on Expert difficulty, and has at least a 100 combo going when the camera shows the screen.
Literature
- In Stormbreaker, Alex gets a modified Game Boy Color and cartridges that not only have the games themselves but also provide the modified GB Color with useful functions. Two of these games, Nemesis and Bomber Boy (aka Atomic Punk in the United States), are actual Game Boy titles. Sadly though, Alex never uses the game parts of the cartridges.
- In Skeleton Key, he gets a Game Boy Advance with a Rayman game that doubles as a Geiger counter.
- In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry mentions that Dudley broke his PlayStation (and comments about Dudley playing Ultra Super Death Gorefest Chainsawer 3000 games). Given that he was writing that in the summer of 1994 and the system would not be available in Japan until that December, nor in Europe until September of the following year, JK Rowling admits she screwed up with the numbers.
Live Action TV
Web Comics
- Parodied in this Sluggy Freelance strip. Kada refers to the game as "Super Graphical 3D Battle Area In 3D(tm)" and the game options offer everything from "battle smells" to "monkeys", but what we actually see on the holographic screen looks like crude black-and-white 8-bit graphics - specifically, arcade classic Berzerk.
- Digital Unrest has had a couple of cracks at this trope: Here and here.
- Mega Tokyo makes lots of references to gaming technology that does not (yet?) exist in the real world, such as the Play Station 4, Mosh Mosh Revolution ("Tohya, what's a mosh?") and a Robot Girl accessory for Dating Sim games.
- Early in the strip's run (2001) characters are seen wearing Play Station 3 paraphernalia, including a jacket with the line "Live in your world, Die in mine." parodying a Sony ad campaign of the time.
- Said character has been updated to feature a PlayStation 4 jacket. Sony developers in both cases were talking about developing said sequel consoles right as the current consoles were about to be released.
- Lampshaded in this strip from The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob. Bob just isn't a very "state-of-the-art" kind of guy.
Western Animation
- The South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" revolves around the real-life MMORPG World Of Warcraft, complete with plenty of gameplay footage (part of it was Machinima). Blizzard lent a lot of assistance to make the episode (they're apparently big South Park fans, but then again who isn't?) The episode, however, has many intentional inconsistencies compared to the real game — although, in a reverse example, Blizzard actually put some of the content from the episode into the game after the episode aired.
- Not to mention the Guitar Hero-themed South Park episode, which depicted Stan and Kyle as being the first ever to reach "one million points!".
- Episode 1214, "The Ungroundables", had the kids playing the PC version of the recently released Call Of Duty: World At War. It also included a reference to the "Flak Jacket Glitch", where a player using the Flak Jacket perk, which normally reduces damage taken from explosives, could not be insta-killed with either the combat knife or bayonet.
- The male characters on Teen Titans would frequently play video games in their downtime, which sported the same look as the animation in the show. In one episode, they were clearly playing F-Zero. On the other hand, one episode had Robin playing a Galaga-style shooter and totally flipping out because he beat Cyborg's high score. Wow.
- Played with in an episode of Arthur. Near the end, Arthur and company are playing a video game that touts itself as one of the best ever - up to and until the actual gameplay. SEE! 16-bit graphics that would look primitive on the early SNES! HEAR! 8-bit early NES-style music! WITNESS! Gameplay that would make Action 52 look fun! The general consensus among the characters is obviously along the lines of "what am I looking at?!".
- The depiction of games on The Simpsons throughout the show's run have usually been close to current, although the show's long history means that the early seasons would appear to suffer from this trope if viewed today.
- The game played by Bart and Homer in "Moaning Lisa" (1990) is similar to Mike Tyson's Punch Out (1987).
- "Bonestorm", as depicted in "Marge Be Not Proud" (1995), is named after Blood Storm and parodies Mortal Kombat-style games. Mario and Sonic also appear in the episode.
- However, it stumbles into the trope spectacularly in "Yokel Chords" (2007). Therapist Dr. Swanson attempts to gain Bart's interest with the popular video game "Death Kill City III: Death Kill Stories". (Bear with me here...) Dr. Swanson and Bart button mash furiously, Bart jerking the controller from side to side like an angry chimpanzee, playing what is apparently a fighting game. A martial artist and cyborg fight each other for a while, and both are dispatched by a sudden ninja attack for some reason, who is then nuked for some other reason. The announcer says "You have ended all civilization on Earth. Level 1 complete!"
- The Movie goes the other way: Homer plays Grand Theft Walrus, in a convenience store, on an arcade machine. In Alaska.
- Another episode had Lisa becoming addicted to "Dash Dingo", an obvious homage to Crash Bandicoot which was released at the height of that series' popularity on what was clearly a Play Station.
- And then there was an entire episode inside an MMORPG and many of the townsfolk were playing it. They had plenty of jokes like how silly it is to accept quests from strangers, Bart being a kid IRL but really powerful in the game, Moe wondering why he is paying $15 a month for this, etc. Granted, there were also departures from realism, but they were not greater then the show's usual departures from realism of the "real" town in comparison to real life.
- Overall, the depiction was pretty accurate and faithful, even complete with a HUD display accurate for MMORPGs. What's strange though, is that people in real life knew who each other's avatar equivalents were, perhaps because their avatars were identical to their real-life selves and even their personalities (Moe being the Butt Monkey in the above example, for example).
- And then there's the Dangerously Genre Savvy The Game, which also for the most part avoids The Problem With Licensed Games (fortunately).
- In the "Chicken Ball Z" episode of The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, it is easy to recognize the game Billy was playing on his handheld by the sound effects — it's Wario Land II, probably one of the later levels, based on the music. Billy calls it something different, of course, and no visuals are shown.
- In an episode of The Powerpuff Girls, the Mayor is playing what is clearly The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (albeit so badly that he accidentally kills his own fairy), which was a fairly recent release at that point.
- Another one from Powerpuff Girls: in "The Powerpuff Girls' Best Rainy Day Adventure Ever", Blossom seeks out the other two after a long-since abandoned game of hide-and-seek and finds them playing what is obviously Pitfall on a console that closely resembles the Atari 2600.
- In one scene a TV screen displayed a picture and played noise that was more or less pulled directly from one of the TV's in the Game Cube release of Animal Crossing.
- In ReBoot, the games that periodically threatened the characters were generally believable and fairly current for the time, though they generally used No Celebrities Were Harmed versions.
- The beginning of Toy Story 2. While the graphics are every bit as advanced as the movie's animation (and intentionally so), the "game over" screen puts very oldish video game music with just the two words "GAME OVER". Also, the system being played looks a lot like a Super Nintendo.
Other
- The Guild, consisting largely of references to a game similar to World Of Warcraft (by a writer who was addicted to it for several years) obviously averts this for the most part. It seems like it falls into this trope, though, with Tinkerballa, who's constantly playing a Nintendo DS with old-school Super Mario Bros. sounds. Except it doesn't, because one of the most popular games for the DS is actually The New Super Mario Bros.
- There's a battery commercial that features a kid playing what looks to be a (fictional) Game Boy Advance fighting game against his grandpa, and defeating him over and over - until his batteries start dying on him, allowing his grandpa to turn the tables. The notably true-to-life moment comes when we see the grandpa's character continuing to land sorta-registered blows even as his opponent falls, which seems to indicate that someone on the team, at least, was doing their homework.
- Parodied in Foxtrot when the mother demanded to see the videogames Jason played. Her first response is, "why is that monkey jumping on someone's head?" Foxtrot, much like Zits, is more accepting and aware of technology than most comics.
- Early strips featured both Jason and Peter playing Super Mario Bros., Jason bringing a Game Boy on a family trip, and the release of the SNES. Also, one recent sunday strip has Jason attempting to get a copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and he regularly plays World Of War
craftQuest.
- And let's not forget Jason's Long List of then-recent game releases (complete with Take That at Duke Nukem Forever) in a later strip.
- Mad Magazine's "The Lighter Side Of" often features kids who are playing video games on consoles that vaguely resemble actual ones. However, one strip shows a girl eagerly grasping the controller while the disk door is open.
- There is a porn video where a girl is distracted by her boyfriend while playing Warcraft 3 (with the proper sounds). Of course, this is a Real Life style video.
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