The Cuckoolander Was Right / Video Games

The Cuckoolander Was Right in Video Games.

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• The old bag-lady you meet near the beginning of Alan Wake seems to be just another crazy old tramp, ranting about the importance of changing light-bulbs and whatnot... but considering the nature of the game, it should come as no surprise that she knows EXACTLY what's going on, and EXACTLY how to fight it. In fact, she's the ONLY one who knows, due to being excluded from a bout of reality-alteration that made everybody else in the world forget. With her true title as 'The Lady of The Light' revealed, she ends up playing a huge role in the last half of the game. She's still a tad crazy, though.
• At the beginning of Alpha Prime, the utterly drunk Freddie (and later, the eccentric Paolo) keeps insisting that this prospector's urban legend "Glomar" is a real creature who is the source of hubbardium. While not quite literal, by the end, it's undeniable that Glomar is definitely some kind of real, extraterrestrial force that creates hubbardium out of the rocks surrounding its heart, among other things.
• In Alpha Protocol, many of the conspiracy theories that Steven Heck rambles on about actually happened in Real Life (Operation Acoustic Kitty) could be argued to have actually happened (his theory about the collusion between the Federal Reserve and private banks to screw over the American people), or can be revealed to have actually happened in the game (his theory about the government screwing with commodity prices in order to manipulate people's minds; if you ask Mina to dig up intel on Parker, she will send you an email noting that that was the subject of his doctoral dissertation).
• In Throne of Bhaal, the mad general Gromnir basically tells you Amelissan's evil plot early on, but nobody takes him seriously because they assume he's just raving. (He is, but being paranoid doesn't mean they aren't really after you.)
• Insane characters in Crusader Kings II can, as part of a random even chain, pass laws against violence that greatly resemble our own modern conceptions of human rights. Unfortunately, the effort really is quite insane, given that Deliberate Values Dissonance is a key part of the game and the rulers' neighbors and vassals will treat this as a sign of exploitable weakness.
• Agent Francis York Morgan from Deadly Premonition. Some of the things he says to his imaginary friend Zach who is really the player as well as some of the things he envisions when staring into his coffee are often foreshadowing of future events Oracle-style. Likewise, his unorthodox procedures often yield hidden evidence, contrary to the expectations of those around him. A lot of his words and actions are dismissed by the sheriff in particular, at least early on. Of course, while York is definitely odd, he is arguably normal in-verse considering how strange most of the residents of Greenvale are.
• One of the major premises behind the Deus Ex series, most notably in the first and the third games, is that every paranoid conspiracy theory you've heard is right.
  • The closest example to the spirit of the trope is possibly Gunther's ridiculous claims that the vending machine maintenance man is plotting against him. Which Invisible War confirms to be true.
  • The Nameless Mod discusses this premise in the fan fiction shop, and has this from a hobo you encounter in Forum City, who mentions that he saw aliens abduct Deus Diablo.
• Gudrun from Dead In Vinland spouts nonsense frequently, either falls asleep mid-conversation a lot or pretends to, has selective hearing, insults everyone, crudely asks The Bard for sex... and prophesies in dramatic fashion that someone in the group will stab another to death, and this will be discovered at night. Depending on who you recruit into your Player Party, she may be right...
• Day of the Tentacle:
  • John Hancock suggests adding an amendment to the Constitution saying the President has to be a human being. Had this been accepted, it would have prevented Purple Tentacle's rise to power, but Thomas Jefferson dismisses it as a stupid idea.
  • Jefferson also vetoes Hancock's suggestion to make dumping toxic sludge in rivers illegal, on the same grounds.
  • An optional conversation allows Hoagie to suggest getting to work on the national debt. Jefferson scoffs that America is too prosperous to ever go into debt. (Even though America was in debt even back then.) This was also probably a joke about how the economy and national debt were key issues during the 1992 presidential election.
• Manuel from Mass Effect (seen below) has a Dragon Age: Origins counterpart in the Chasind Doomsayer, a refugee you meet in Lothering who's wailing at the top of his lungs about how "the evil will descend upon us" and freaking out a group of villagers (and giving a nearby Templar a nasty headache). When you approach him, he calls you out for being part of the evil. He's right—Lothering is destroyed shortly after you leave it, and Alistair and the Warden are tainted with darkspawn blood.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • M'aiq the Lair is a recurring Easter Egg Legacy Character who has appeared in every game in the series since Morrowind. M'aiq is a known a Fourth-Wall Observer (and Leaner and Breaker) who voices the opinions of the series' creators and developers, largely in the form of Take Thats, to both the audience (given the ES Unpleasable Fanbase) and isn't above above taking some at Bethesda itself. Given his role, M'aiq comes off as very detached from the setting, and each incarnation of him also has some odd quirks that cause him to come off as a Cloud Cuckoolander. However, he also offers some nuggets of truth buried deep in his Blatant Lies dialogue. In Morrowind, he informs the player of Boethiah's sunken statue (which leads you to the subsequent quest) and in Skyrim he drops hints that the Falmer's blindness has something to do with the Dwemer.
  • Several games in the series include the book Chance's Folly, which tells the story of a thief known by the nickname "Chance" who overheard someone mention a tomb containing great riches and decided to obtain them. To assist her she enlisted Ulstyr Moresby, a hulking Breton known for being a great warrior and for being totally bonkers, figuring that an insane man wouldn't particularly care if he didn't get an equal share of the loot. When asked to come along, Ulstyr nods and starts rattling off random phrases which seem like nonsense, but Chance becomes nervous when they eventually start coming true, wondering if the tales about the insane communing with Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness were actually true, and if he was feeding Ulstyr information. He was.
    • "Chitin": The next day, Ulstyr showed up wearing chitin armour. During the trip there was a downpour of rain that soaked Chance while Ulstyr stayed perfectly dry in his waterproof chitin.
    • "Hot steel": Ulstyr carried a sword enchanted with fire damage, which was particularly effective against the Frost Atronachs guarding the tomb.
    • While exploring the tomb, Ulstyr added "drain ring" and "Mother Chance" to his vocabulary. This came as quite a shock to Chance as she used her real name and not her nickname when introducing herself, and did indeed wear a ring capable of draining other people's vitality which she kept hidden under her glove.
    • "Fifty-three": When they finally reached the treasure chamber, there were fifty-three sacks of gold.
    • "Walls beyond doors": When Chance entered the treasure chamber, the door slammed shut behind her. From inside it looked indistinguishable from the wall, and could not be opened.
    • "Two months and back": Ulstyr left and returned to the tomb after two months, when Chance would be long dead.
    • "Prop a rock": Ulstyr used a rock to prop open the door so that it wouldn't slam shut on him as well, and took all the gold for himself.
• Fallout: New Vegas gives us No-Bark Noonan, Novac's local Conspiracy Theorist and crazy old man who has taken a few too many radscorpion stings to the head. Much of what he says is nonsense, but there's always a glimmer of truth in there, and the information you can dig out of his ramblings will help you complete several quests in town. After completing the quest "Come Fly with Me", No-Bark can be heard being interviewed on Radio New Vegas, where he... simply recaps the events of the quest without any crazy rambling, but because it sounds just as crazy as his crazy rambling, it's dismissed. Also, there's the fact that the "interview" was actually just him yelling at a teddy bear, and one of RNV's microphones just happened to record it by accident.
  No-Bark: It's ghouls, I tell ya! Religious ghouls in rockets, lookin' for a land to call their home!
  • Also, if you ask him about people acting strange, he says he doesn't trust anyone who doesn't act strange, because everyone has something strange about them, and if they don't show it, then that means they're hiding it, and if they're hiding it, then that means it must be something really bad. This is pretty good advice for solving a quest in town, where the friendly old lady who runs the motel turns out to have sold Boone's pregnant wife into slavery, and made sure she got paid extra for the fetus.
• Joseph Seed, the antagonist of Far Cry 5. He has wrought terror and havoc upon Hope County, Montana, all in the name of a "Great Collapse" that he claims God has forewarned him of. But when the protagonist has torn his fiefdom to the ground and is ready to arrest him, nuclear war breaks out between the United States and North Korea, proving Joseph right all along (this is foreshadowed in the game by ominous news broadcasts that can be heard throughout the game, reporting escalating international tensions).
• In Horizon Zero Dawn Aloy finds a Banuk Shaman exiled for drinking the blood of machines. In doing so, he winds up having visions that are surprisingly accurate about the exact nature of these machines and their creation.
• In Jables's Adventure, Squiddy mentions meeting the Princess. Jables replies that he didn't know there was a princess in this game. Squiddy admits that neither did he. Nevertheless, after you defeat the final boss, the princess shows up out of nowhere for you to rescue.
• In BioWare's Mass Effect series:
  • Early in Mass Effect we get Manuel, a quack on Eden Prime that raves incomprehensibly about an end of the world scenario and is treated as insane by his companion. WAY later on in the game the team learns that his doomsday rants are more accurate than you originally thought. The accuracy of his rambling has lead some fans to theorize that Manuel might have also glimpsed the Prothean beacon's message and his mind was destroyed, as Liara suggested might happen to someone who, unlike Shepard, lacked the extraordinary willpower to handle it.
  • A Dr. Manuel Cayce appears in the second game during the Firewalker missions, where Shepard investigates a series of planets in the Hammerhead. These planets detail a Dr. Manuel's search for evidence of Reaper invasion including text documents showing his growing paranoia over whether his associate had become indoctrinated (Dr. Manuel decides to make sure and kills him) and leads the player to a huge floating Prothean sphere artifact that shrinks down to the size of a bowling ball when touched. Shephard then uses it as a centerpiece. While never stated outright if he is the same doctor in game (though apparently confirmation at one point in development did exist), it's the same voice actor portraying him and he mentions not letting another Eden Prime take place.
  • One Volus billionaire claimed that he had a vision of "machine devils" and went to great expense trying to excavate a world where he believed tombs of a special race capable of defeating them were buried. While the second part never panned out, his claims were noted as being not so outlandish in the third game.
• The manual of Myth tells the story of a mad Journeyman who thinks the world is like a coin tossed in the air, flipping between ages of light and dark.
• The sequel to Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent introduces a woman called Korka who lives in the town and also suspects something strange is going on. However, after she reveals that she suspects that everything is about a bigfoot that lives in the area, Nelson promptly leaves and calls her crazy in his audiolog. Guess what creature ends up helping him destroy the lunacy ray?
• Not for Broadcast has Pompous Political Pundit Alan James, Conspiracy Theorist and Alex Jones expy who at the start of the game rants about the new regime planning to "groom" children and kill grandparents. He's absolutely right, as soon afterwards the country begins to backslide into a People's Republic of Tyranny with the Player Character's son requesting to join their equivalent of Hitler Youth and the revelation that the elderly are exempt from their socialized healthcare program, essentially forcing them into their assisted suicide program. However, it ends up being Zig-Zagged later on as Alan ends up becoming a spokesman for La Résistance, who are revealed at the end to be just as bad as the people they're trying to depose. Keeping Alan alive is one of the keys to the Golden Ending in which the country manages to Take a Third Option.
• In Portal 2, a certain broken turret you can save from "redemption" known as the oracle turret spouts some rather cryptic lines like "Don't make lemonade!" and "Her name is Caroline". All of it foreshadows events in the latter half of the game.
• Shegor in Psychonauts says her turtle, Mr. Pokeylope, "always tells me what to do." Right when you assume she's projecting on the poor little thing, the turtle starts talking. In a deep, sexy voice, it outlines a plan you must follow to advance further in the game.
• In Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, in the first vid-comic, Captain Qwark mentions fighting robotic pirate ghosts, to the dismay of the vid-comic narrator. Come Ratchet & Clank: Quest for Booty some years later, and what do you, as Ratchet, fight? That's right: robotic pirate ghosts.
• RWBY: Arrowfell: Moss earnestly tries to convince Team RWBY that his cave is a town that's a popular tourist attraction, and it's received a lot of tourists recently. Although Team RWBY knows that Hanlon Fifestone held a press conference there the day before, they dismiss his reference to four girls visiting a few days before as him talking about them rather than Team BRIR, whom they eventually discover has been travelling all over the local region recently. Later on, they learn that Qrow also visited there very recently to leave a surveillance drone with Moss to track Hanlon's movements. As a result, Moss is right... his home has indeed received a lot of visitors recently.
• Rena of Shira Oka: Second Chances does seem to be a bit of a loon with her constant talks about spirits and ghosts but she really does have these powers and that her magic potions really work.
• Star Control: Virtually everything the Pkunk say sounds like lunatic ramblings. Ignore them when they tell you where they got their information ... but don't ignore the information itself.
  • The Utwig are a race whose entire religion revolves around the Ultron, a device they bought from the Druuge. The Utwig claims it gives them magical powers and guidance, while every other race think it's a useless piece of junk and the Utwig were ripped off. However, all of the advice the Ultron supposedly gives them turns out to be important, including giving the Druuge useless artifacts as payment for the Ultron instead of the Precursor Bomb they were trying to obtain, and (when you repair it in a bid to gain their alliance) attacking only the Kohr-Ah and subsequently delaying their victory in the Doctrinal War. Having Commander Hayes examine the repaired Ultron reveals that it's actually a Precursor device which only affects certain races, so perhaps the Utwig were onto something when they bought it.
• Dan Hibiki and Rufus are both notorious in Street Fighter for having somewhat tenuous grips on sanity and Rufus, in particular, is prone to spouting off random gibberish. At the same time, though, they're both the only members of the Street Fighting crew to call E. Honda out on the fact that, despite what he believes, the fighting style he uses is not traditional sumo wrestling, and so he is undermining his own arguments that sumo should be respected as a legitimate fighting style.
• In a Team Fortress 2 comic, Scout explains to Spy that his plan for staying wealthy after losing his job is that he's put all his fortune into Tom Jones memorabilia, reasoning that when Jones dies, those old records and autographs will shoot up in value. Spy exasperatedly points out that Tom Jones is a thirty-two-year-old in his physical prime with no known enemies, so he's not going to die for at least several decades.^note The game and comics take place in the early '70s. By an astounding coincidence, though, Jones got killed a few months later by the Soldier.
• Roadkill in Twisted Metal 2 where he was called crazy for believing that the whole thing was All Just a Dream but in the end of the story Calypso believed him, granted his wish, and he woke up. Or did he?
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines:
  • Rosa the Thin-Blood will frequently descend into long and nonsensical speeches about such things as "The Crimson Ship" or "The Voice In The Darkness, Boss." And, of course, as the game slowly progresses, Rosa's prophesies start to come true. It is implied that she is a Malkavian Thin-Blood. Because she is a Thin-Blood, she manages to stave off madness much of the time and remain mostly sane. Because she is a Malkavian, during the times when she does descend into madness what she says usually means more than it might seem at first glance.
  • A Malkavian protagonist will have quite a few moments like this, too, often casually dropping atomic-bomb scale foreshadowing and revelations into dialog. It looks like a Malkavian PC is just a Talkative Loon, but almost everything he says has a hidden or double meaning. Emphasis on almost, granted...
  • In both cases, however, neither of the characters actually understand what they are talking about: They merely see glimpses of things without the necessary context to comprehend it. An example is when the Malkavian encounters Ming Xiao and refers to her as "The Mistress of Mirrors", which angers her. She is a shapeshifter (thus 'reflecting' others), but the Malkavian doesn't know that.
  • One of The Deb of Night's regular listeners is Gomez, a loony Conspiracy Theorist that rambles utter nonsense about traffic lights with cameras monitored by The Illuminati and the like. However, in his final call to the show, he not only mentions the secret vampire society but goes on to pretty much summarize the entire plot of the game.
• Yes, Your Grace: Cedani, the youngest princess, is on a fairytale-fueled one-person mission to "rescue her recently-married older sister from an evil prince", for which she tries training the various wild animals she adopts. She later turns out to have cast the right person as her scenario's villain.

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