Pac Man Fever - Television Tropes & Idioms

Television producers simply do not understand video games.

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. Even old Atari-style Joystick controllers still show up, periodically.

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, anyone who has ever played a video game for more than five seconds knows that 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.

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.

This is less common in anime, due to the cultural Japanese technophilia.

The trope of 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 synching up.

For reasons that this editor wishes someone would explain, the Arcade Sounds most commonly heard are those of the widely-criticized Atari2600 version of Pac Man. Why, out of all possible video games, did this game -- and very, very, few others -- get added to the standard palette of Stock Sound Effects right in between the "ricochet" gunshot sound and the 3-stooges eyepoke? The world may never know. (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.

Examples:

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.
- 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 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 Gameboy, mashing the buttons while arcade noises sound. When the Gameboy is broken, he pulls a second one out of his pants, immediately playing it with the same sound effects.
In the episode Homework of Everybody Loves Raymond, 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.
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.
House reprehensibly abuses this trope in one episode by showing House playing Metroid on his GBA SP. ...however, despite the close-up on the GBA screen several times, you very pointedly hear Pac Man bleeps and blops.
- 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 the claws of a big alien thing worked better as something recognisably negative (despite being something the player has to do to progress) using it complete with a "Oh, that's gotta hurt!" reaction shot from House.
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 (okay, theoretically he could own a modded Xbox and might be emulating, but still).
Film example: In Charlie's 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.
In an episode of Lost, a child is seen playing a Game Boy. He then tells his father that it needs new batteries. However, it's a Game Boy Advance SP, which has a rechargeable battery. You'd think that the kid would've said something to the director.
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.
In one episode of ER Dr. Kovatch buys a brand new console, which 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 feature was not added to the Game Boy line until 2001. And even then, you still needed a game to link up with to download the game onto your Game Boy.)
The films Rumble in the Bronx and Airheads featured cartridgeless Sega Game Gear consoles as well.
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.
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 original 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. Since he also mentions the Prince Of Persia series, though, this may just be a nostalgia thing.
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.) In this editor's opinion, a game where you just shoot people who don't do anything but walk around would get boring after one minute.
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. 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.
Futurama hangs a lampshade on this, with characters playing a dead ringer for the original Game Boy with Arcade Sounds... in the year 3000.
- Another Futurama episode featured a "what if" scenario, with the world changed to resemble video games that Fry had played. According to the DVD commentary on the first episode Fry was born in 1974, but every game referenced was from 1983 or earlier, which becomes absurd when one realizes that Fry would have been a toddler when half these games were around, and would have grown up during the 8-bit/16-bit era of the late eighties and early nineties. Since most people know more about that era than more recent games, it makes sense, even if it is a little jarring.
  - To be fair Fry mentions he played these games in a pizza parlor, and this troper grew up a decade after Fry and had Galaga and Pac-Man machines in his pizza parlor.
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.
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 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.
In the first Jimmy Timmy Power Hour, Timmy is seen playing a video game called "The Decimator", which would later become a part of his half of the plot. It's in 3D, but it's played on a portable, Game Boy-esque system, and everything else in the screen is animated in standard The Fairly OddParents Thick Line Animation.
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 levels (at least, not explicitly numbered ones), 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.
Live Free or Die Hard has dozens of computers but no mice. Hackers probably love videogames but neither of the two mentions them. I suspect the actor who played a heroic hacker had unlike this movie's creators used computers because he reached for the area that should have contained a mouse.
Rare music example: 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. Go figure.
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.
Justified in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and San Andreas, which take place in the late eighties and early nineties respectively.

And noticeable exceptions:

Malcolm In The Middle was very current with its representation of The Sims as "The Virts".
The South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" revolves around the real-life MMORPG World Of Warcraft, complete with plenty of gameplay footage. The episode, however, has many intentional inconsistencies compared to the real game.
- In a reverse example, though, Blizzard actually put some of the content from the episode into the game after the episode aired.
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.
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.
In Episode Five of Primeval, Connor plays a game called Oblivion using an Xbox 360 controller. The on-screen graphics are taken from the real-life Xbox 360 game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Totally 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. (This would probably explain why they're so poor: they bought a PS3. Oh Snap!)
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), so the movie is only a partial exception.
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.
Lucky Star's video games are often fairly accurate parodies of real games; unsurprising, since one of the main characters is a game otaku.
Averted in SPACED, in which Tim is clearly shown playing Resident Evil 2. 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.
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.
Similarly, in Simon Pegg's Shaun Of The Dead, playing Timesplitters (appropriately a UK-developed shooter game) on a PS 2 is depicted accurately, aside from a "Player 2 has entered the game" voiceover narration added for the audience's benefit.
The recent movie 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.
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 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!" Then again, it may simply be Rule Of Cool at work...
- The Movie goes the other way: Homer plays Grand Theft Walrus, in a convenience store, on an arcade machine.
- 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Kevin Smith's Mallrats 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.
- Not from what I can see. Brodie plays NHL '94 in the morning (protesting that Hartford only beats Vancouver once or twice in a lifetime), but nobody mentions it again.
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.
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.
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.
The anime Shigofumi does a wonderful subversion of this trope. A young girl, obsessed with playing a game very recognizable as 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. And the actual game is a very accurate--though genericized, of course--depiction of Animal Crossing.
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 is misleading to what is possible to do in-world.
In the first episode of Death Note, a student can be seen playing a Nintendo DS.
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.
The webcomic Digital Unrest has had a couple of cracks at this trope: Here and http://digitalunrestcomic.com/index.php?date=2007-06-18 here]].

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