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Pac Man Fever
"You Win! Advance to Level 7!"

Note: Not to be confused with the game of the same name.

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 has become increasingly rare since the early Nintendo days. 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, sophisticated graphics are expensive. Secondly, everyone in the audience is familiar with the original 8-bit games with bloops and bleeps (see Small Reference Pools). Thirdly, in animation the characters are already primitive, so it makes sense the video game characters would be even more so. Fourthly, video games directly compete with TV as a time sink, so making them appear attractive could theoretically hurt ratings. Most of all, though, the writers grew up with primitive games, or none at all.

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.) 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.

There is yet another, even more prosaic reason for the use of certain well-known videogame sound effects. Simply put, they're copyright-hassle-free. To quote jt august from the newsgroup (ask granpa!) rec.games.video.classic:

Back in the 80's, someone within Warner Bros. compiled a collection of media foley effects, a set that was issued as a royalty free collection. This means that a media producer buys the record (now CD), and they get a reuse license that allows them to use the sound effects anyway they wish without paying further royalties.

The thing about royalty free recordings is that over time, those recordings get reissued by other sources, and the original issuer gets lost in the shuffle. This sound effect featuring 2600 Pac-Man and 2600 Donkey Kong effects has a tangible video game effect that works in the minds of many TV and film oriented producers and directors. Combine that with the fact that today's games use real foley (sound effects), so that they don't sound "computery," and it becomes clear why this effect is still being used today.

Using very simple game graphics on live action shows may be related to the difficulty of filming computer monitors, owing to the frame-rate of monitor and camera not syncing up.

On the flip side, many people who grew up with the primitive games now play the new ones as adults; in fact, many developers have taken to completely ignoring children as an audience altogether. Therefore, more and more of the audience can be expected to play and enjoy modern games. 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.

Product Placement is another common reason to avert this trope. After all, bleeps and bloops won't help cross-sell the games of your parent company's wholly owned subsidiary.

This is less common in anime, due to the cultural Japanese technophilia. (Just compare the high Japanese-to-Western ratio of the Exceptions to the 99.99% Western Examples!)

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.

If you're lucky, you'll get Donkey Kong 2600 instead of Pac-Man 2600.

Pushed far enough, can lead to Schizo Tech.

Examples:

Anime
  • 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.
  • Pokémon opens its first episode with a direct re-creation of the original game's opening, sound effects and all, which slowly becomes a battle scene consistent with the series proper.

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.
  • The video game-themed movie Grandma's Boy avoids most of these pitfalls, 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.
    • Inverted later in the film when Alex and Sam are shown actually playing Guilty Gear and Alex performs a complex special move that could have only been done by a person familiar with the game.
    • At one point JP mentions the graphics in the video game being developed were "very Miyamoto". They were not 'Miyamoto' in the slightest.
    • Actually, it is pretty likely a game designer would only have one copy of a game he created, if any. He might have a few developer's discs/carts lying around, but these would be alpha versions and would require special hardware to play. A finished version has to be compiled, then pressed (for discs, fairly quick but requires industrial-grade equipment) or fabricated (for cartridges, can take weeks to months depending on quantity needed), so new copies would not be readily available.
    • At one point, a producer character congratulates the testers for "finding all the bugs" in their video game. To put it briefly, that's not how QA works.
  • The films Rumble in the Bronx and Airheads featured cartridgeless Sega Game Gear consoles as well.
    • 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.
    • Reality is Unrealistic. Many programmers consider mice to be annoying and unnecessary, and hacking is generally done from the command line anyway; so it wouldn't be that surprising to find a hacker's computer mouseless, especially if that hacker was 30+ years old. Why you would try to play Gears on a computer without a mouse, though...
  • The movie Jarhead has a few lines of dialogue referring to levels in Metroid (none of the games in the series are broken up into levels), and that if you reach the tenth level, nothing happens, you just start at the beginning again. Erm, no.
  • 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.
  • Half-subverted in the 2008 Mickey Rourke film The Wrestler, where the main character plays a classic NES game featuring his 8-bit likeness with a neighborhood kid. However, the playing of the archaic console is used more as a narrative device to display the character's yearning for his glory days and, as they play, the kid discusses Call Of Duty 4. Despite this subversion, the sound effects played during the game are from... you guessed it, Pac-Man on the 2600.
    • This should count as a full subversion, as the movie crew developed Wrestle Jam '88! from scratch.
    • "...the NES game features sound samples from the Atari 2600 versions of Donkey Kong and Pac-Man—the unofficial Wilhelm Scream of video game sound effects..."
  • 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 premeire 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... TurboGrafx-16 TurboExpress? Not only is the TurboExpress unable to communicate with PCMCIA but there's no way it could play video files, either. (Case mod anyone?)
  • 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.

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 mistake of referring to levels, despite that the franchise is a poster child for Sequence Breaking. 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.
    • 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.
      • It might have been making fun of how hard the game is regarded as.
      • Oddly enough, this is one of the few instances where a game isn't represented as a button-masher, with House pressing buttons at random intervals instead of just constantly. Unfortunately, it's a case of Did Not Do The Research, as Ninja Gaiden II 'is' a button-masher...
  • 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.
    • 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.
    • In a similar vein, one episode of Murphy Brown had Murphy and Frank getting ready to play Super Mario World. They plunk down on the couch and pick up NES controllers. The music of the game is also wrong.
      • 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.
  • 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.
  • This troper recalls an episode of some Disney TV show (Hannah Montana or That's So Raven), where two people were playing a video game together. One person had a GameCube controller, and the other had an Xbox 360 controller.
  • 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).
    • Would be justified, under normal circumstances, as Play Station is a synonym for 'games-console' to some. However — this being The BBC they avoid using synonyms like the proverbial plague, to the point where should the word SEMTEX® be broadcast, it's quickly followed by "Other plastic explosives are available!"
  • 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, Wier 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:
    • 1. 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?
    • 2. The Beta wasn't available yet.
    • 3. He claimed his character was level 75. The Burning Crusade raised the level cap from 60 to 70.
    • 4. 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.
    • 5. Wier, 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.
    • 6. 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 Gameboy taken away from him in school, and when he finally gets it back... it turns out to be a Nintendo DS.
    • This troper knows adults who refer to all handheld systems as Gameboys, so it's quite possible that he was calling it that to avoid confusion for the adults on the show, and for the adults watching.
  • 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. Also Sub-Zero has never been a final boss.
    Reese: No one believes I beat the last level of Mortal Kombat.
    Dad: Because that's just ridiculous. No one beats Sub-Zero!

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 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.
    • Not so justified in Bully, though, since the game seems to take place in modern times, but all the arcade games are 80s-esque (then again, this was probably intentional for nostalgia or something)
      • As this troper recalls, the arcade machines were found in places that would be looking to buy cheap (the school), be stolen (the clubhouses), or be 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 Fire Red and Leaf Green (as it's basically product placement for discontinued products)

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 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 haven't been made since the '70s!
  • 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.
  • An interesting example occurred in an episode of Family Guy with a joke about the 72 virgins that suicide bombers are supposedly promised. Basically, a suicide bomber gets into Fluffy Cloud Heaven and is disappointed to discover his 72 virgins are a bunch of (male) nerds, all with computers, who invite him to play Magic The Gathering with them. Now, there are computer adaptations of MTG, but the original game IS a collectible card game, not a computer game!
  • 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.

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. Krahulik is holding an Xbox 360 controller upside down, while Holkins is holding a PSP as if it's a controller.
  • 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 GTA 4, 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.
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • A few years ago this troper was reading the manual for a new television set he just bought. In the section explaining how to connect VCRs, speakers, and videogame consoles to the tv was an illustration of a Nintendo 64 with a Playstation controller plugged into the fourth controller port.

Exceptions:

Anime
  • Episode 28 of Keroro Gunsou shows Natsumi playing a game that's obviously supposed to be 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.
  • 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 (I believe) 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.
    • Hold it! One episode has Konata and Yutaka playing a game with the Wii Remote turned sideways, and the sounds are out of the NES port of 1942, which is not on Virtual Console in any region yet. Of course, there's always the possibility that she has the Homebrew Channel installed...
      • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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.
  • 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.
  • 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. This troper would actually be interested in playing the game shown in the movie (minus the real-life murder).
    • Oh ho ho, Stay Alive is an example of this trope at some points as well. Take when one character asks another for help as he is stuck in Silent Hill 4. From what I remember, the advice was to not use infinite ammo or the Hyperblaster (none of which exist in Silent Hill 4) and to drop all of his weapons before the boss fight and she (referring to the boss) will die. Note, however, that this particular trick doesn't work in Silent Hill 4, nor is the final boss a she. Makes me think that they were referring to the original Silent Hill, or with a little less errors, Silent Hill 2.
      • Silent Hill 3, perhaps? Female character, with a 'Hyperblaster' (Heather Beam/Sexy Beam) with unlimited ammo that could be unlocked as an Easter Egg. But the player can't drop weapons in SH 3.
      • Silent Hill 1 actually. The final boss dies if you deal enough damage to it, or if you run out of ammo (I'm assuming this is to prevent players being screwed over because ranged weapons are exceedingly rare and ammunition is as easy to find as hens' teeth on some difficulty levels), so a cheap trick is to stand outside the final door and fire off all your bullets.
  • While the game shown in the beginning of Big (the movie) was fictional, it was an extremely accurate representation of a common genre of game at the time the movie was made.
    • That game was fake? Damn it!
  • 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.
    • However, minor invocations of the trope include: while someone is playing one other game, the announcer says "Select a music," implying that he's really at the song select screen, and additional sound effects are added to scenes of people playing some of the games.
      • Multiple copies of the machines were in the scene; it's not unreasonable to think that the "select a music" announcement came from a different machine.
      • A Guitar Freaks machine is prominently shown being played during the scene, which does, in fact, have an announcer say "Select a music" at the song select screen.
  • Subverted 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).
  • Partial aversion: 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.
    • Averted the rest of the way when you consider that it's a MMORPG, which don't usually feature notable storylines, and that it seems to be using the term "level" interchangeably with "area"; Level 4 is the lava plain, level 2 is some kind of battle-dome.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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. 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
  • Malcolm In The Middle was very current with its representation of The Sims as "The Virts".
  • In Episode Five of Primeval, Connor plays The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with graphics taken from the game, on an Xbox 360.
  • Inverted in Heroes, where, in a bit of Product Placement, Jessica and Micah are seen playing Heavenly Sword on the PS3; a game which, at the time of the airing, was yet to be released.
  • Averted in Spaced, in which Tim is clearly shown playing Resident Evil 2. Actual footage of the game is shown, he holds the controller normally, and actual sound effects and music from the game is used. The RPD lobby music from the game is even used for that episode's title sequence. In the commentary, Simon Pegg, who played Tim, says that he was actually playing the game even when the camera didn't show the screen, because he and director Edgar Wright were sick of the above trope. He also plays many other games, including Tekken 2, Time Crisis, and Tomb Raider, which sometimes intrude into the 'real' world.
    • This troper was delighted to notice that when Daisy said something while Tim was playing, Tim pressed the pause button before turning to speak to her.
  • Despite being released in the early 90s, Parker Lewis Can't Lose was brilliantly in touch with video games. This mostly related to cameos (Mario games, mentioning Altered Beast, showing Sega and Nintendo logos in shops), but one episode focused a lot more on them dealing with Jerry's addiction to video games. While still having a lot of humour, it still took on the issue sensibly and intelligently, and ended in a way that showed that the writers had more insight into what video games were about then the vast majority of TV creators, then or since.
  • Sitcom The Big Bang Theory includes a number of stereotypical geeks who play stereotypical games — most notably, World Of Warcraft and Halo. Both are depicted reasonably realistically (though the super-weapon Sheldon ninjas in one ep doesn't actually exist in WoW). They do their research.
    • In episode three of the second season, Sheldon shows Penny the MMORPG Age Of Conan, to which she becomes addicted. The game as well as the behaviour of the players ("I'm AFK", level meaning character-level, enchanted armour etc.) is very well-depicted, with the Rule Of Funny exception that, at the end, the characters mouths' moved in sync with what the players spoke over their headsets.
    • In another episode, the characters are playing Boxing in Wii Sports, complete with look-alike Miis.
    • And in yet another episode, Sheldon plays Mario 64 on an emulator on his laptop. They even used accurate sound effects: when Sheldon pauses the game to talk to someone, they use the actual pause sound from Mario 64. How many non-geeks do you know who know what an emulator is?
    • On the other hand, playing Halo apparently consists of rotating the analog stick as quickly as possible while hitting buttons at random.
    • On the other end of the scale, in another episode they plan to play Zork.
  • Veronica Mars has characters playing video games that are recognizable as Gears of War and Mario Kart, although they are generally button mashing and are playing Gears on an original Xbox, a feat no mere mortal could accomplish.
    • A Season One episode took the research even further; in order to reveal the fraud of a couple of game programmers, Veronica lured them in with promises to see "the new Matrix Online" before it was released. When the episode was aired, Matrix Online was both still yet to be released and also anticipated.
    • This troper found it distracting, though, that three people were gathered around, controllers in hand, to play what looked like a single/first person shooter. Also the fact that in the middle of the game Veronica was able to pick up a controller and start button mashing immediately.
  • CSI: NY had an episode, "Down the Rabbit Hole", using Second Life. Where an assassin uses the program to get to her targets. However, just like South Park, some of the things shown on the show are misleading to what is possible to do in-game.
  • NCIS featured an episode where the team was protecting a particularly Gibbsian preteen boy. To amuse him, McGee provided him with and accurately named a Nintendo DS. Only problem? Judging by the sounds, the kid in question was involved in an intense and gripping session of Pictochat.
    • NCIS was generally good with game technology. All (at the time of broadcast) current gen consoles and handhelds got namechecked.
    • This Troper remembers an episode where McGee sat in a surveillance van, playing Unreal Tournament with the boy he was guarding.
  • The Dead Zone featured a subversion that would have been remarkable if it hadn't smacked of blatant Product Placement. A Christmas episode featured as its B plot Johnny Smith's quest to get his son a copy of Ratchet: Deadlocked, which is not only a very real game, but we see the game and its immediate predecessor Ratchet and Clank 3: Up Your Arsenal actually played in the episode.
  • There is a brief but surprisingly accurate shout out to Second Life in the fourth season of The Office.
  • Nicely averted in an episode of Psych. In order to get on the good side of another police officer, a detective heads to her house on Thanksgiving with the gift of a Nintendo Wii that he got as seized property during a recent drug bust. He proceeds to play Boxing in Wii Sports accurately with the woman's young cousins, using the punching motion controls and even getting too into it and having the kids complain about how good he was.
  • Chuck has the titular character and his friend play Gears Of War; in another episode they play Call Of Duty 4, complete with blatant name dropping.
    • The episode "Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer" was a mixed bag. The actual play of Missile Command was realistic, but its knowledge of how the game worked was deeply flawed. The "killscreen" referred to by the characters is actually more of a Nonstandard Game Over. And the programmer and company responsible for the game were portrayed as East Asian, whereas Atari and programmer Dave Theurer were both American.
      • Of course, Missile Command was released about a year after Rush's "Tom Sawyer". So...Yeah.
  • In Season 2 Episode 9 of Knight Rider ("Soul Survivor"), the main character plays the new-at-the-time Pac-Man.
  • A recent episode of New Tricks had Jack Halford speaking to some college guys about the murder of an old flatmate of theirs. Throughout the discussion, they're playing a generic Point Blank clone on a Wii using the Wii Zapper. Much to this troper's surprise, all the sounds, movements, etc matched up, although oddly enough the pub at the end of the episode just happens to have an arcade cabinet with the exact same game on it.
  • In one Episode of Law and Order: SVU, the team has to investigate a game that looks a lot like Second Life. Turns out that the killer they're looking for has made a replica of one of his earlier killings in said game. It's on the side of a lake, and they need to find the real world-cabin, so Olivia has to yell at the owner to "Turn on the sun!" in order to determine which side of the lake. He actually hesitates before deciding between catching a serial killer and inconveniencing his players. Apparently L&O doesn't have Google Maps.
  • In an episode of Threshold, Lucas plays Halo in an unused conference room, having apparently brought his Xbox with him to Threshold. Molly comes in and surprises us with her video game savvy by giving him a tip on killing Jackals. Apart from footage that shows what is clearly multiplayer action, the game is portrayed accurately.
  • A Canadian TV show called JPod (based on a book of the same name) was really good at inverting this trope. The series takes place at a game developer called Neotronic Arts (the developer is nameless in the book, but it's made clear by some dialog and descriptions that it's supposed to be Electronic Arts) where a small group of programmers are working on a skateboarding game (at the time the book was originally published, EA had announced that it was working on Skate). Throughout the show, characters are seen playing an Xbox 360 (and properly, too. The game they're playing is Halo 3, complete with split screen and everything), and there are multiple shots of a Wii in the background. Anytime the game the characters are working on is shown, the rough look of it is explained away by saying that it's still in development and it won't look like that when the game is finished.

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. 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.
    • Hey, it's not hard to imagine roommates getting competitive with high scores. Also, one Cartoon Network short had two Titans playing a fighting game (Beast Boy lost), possibly involving characters from another cartoon. My memory is fuzzy.
  • 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, this troper easily recognized 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 Legendof Zelda: Ocarina of Time (albeit so badly that he accidentally kills his own fairy), which was a fairly recent release at that point.
    • This is one case where I wish the real version was more like the TV version. Damn Navi.
    • 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.
    • This troper recalls a scene where 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.
    • However, the characters also broke the game's own rules and always killed the user with some cheap shot or trick that no real computer program would've been able to pull off. This could however parody how some people feel when the game doesn't play fair. For example, during the first appearance of Rocky the Raccoon, Enzo and the Bi-nomes inside the game are able to steal a 1-up coin before the user can get it and restore a life. That kind of stuff just doesn't happen and cannot happen unless the game is programmed to allow such an action. In the interest of being fair, no programmer would give the game the ability to steal a 1-up coin from the user.
      • They would! Commander Keen 4 featured Treasure Eaters that could steal any pickup, including keys vital to completing the level if you were slow enough.
  • 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
  • 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 WarcraftQuest.
    • 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.
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