Biting The Hand Humor / Video Games

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• In the Los Angeles mission of the Japanese Campaign in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the player can (and is actively encouraged with rewards) blow up the EA-Los Angeles building. Upon its destruction, a Japanese soldier will yell "Your ill-begotten products shall taint the shelves no more!"
• The Simpsons Game was filled with jokes directed at Electronic Arts.
• The first thing one saw upon booting up Conker's Bad Fur Day for the N64 was the typical N64 logo... which is immediately ripped apart by Conker with a chainsaw, to be replaced by the Rareware logo. This is probably a good first indicator of what someone seduced by the game's disarming appearances is actually in for...
• In the Luigi's Mansion series, Professor E. Gadd creates a new Nintendo console-based device to contact Luigi. In the first game, it's the Game Boy Horror, and in the sequel, it's the Dual Scream. Those following the pattern would likely be expecting something like a DSI or Nintendo 3DS, or maybe a jump to consoles with a Wii U gamepad. But in Luigi's Mansion 3, Professor E. Gadd's newest communication device is the "Virtual Boo"! He plans on selling this on the market, predicting that it'll be a huge success. Anyone who knows their Nintendo history will no doubt be in hysterics over this little nod to one of Nintendo's most infamous failures.
• Reggie Fils-Aime of Nintendo fame considers the Blur commercial, a Take That! at Mario Kart, to be this on the basis that the game's publisher, Activision, also did the GoldenEye (Wii) game exclusively for Nintendo.
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  • On a similar note, Blur was developed by Bizarre Creations, who developed a few Disney games back in the day. When Blur failed to meet sales expectations, Bizarre went defunct and most of their employees went to SUMO Digital, and helped them develop Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. A company that made fun of the kart-racer genre in a commercial, then went on to developing a kart-racer.
• Overlapping with Self-Deprecation, Dragon Age: Origins has the Human Noble origin: "Giant rats? It's like the start of every bad adventure tale my grandfather used to tell." Though, this is probably less a joke about Baldur's Gate itself and more a joke about how every other RPG of the era copied Baldur's Gate for no good reason. The first combat encounter in practically every single RPG (both singleplayer and multiplayer) made in the period between 1995 and 2000 was rats (generally giant). While Baldur's Gate was not the first game to have giant rats as a low-level encounter, it was almost assuredly because of Baldur's Gate that so many games used this as the first combat encounter/combat tutorial. At the time when Dragon Age: Origins was made, those who had played Baldur's Gate and it's imitators as children were now adults: meanwhile RPGs had long ceased to be so uncreative with their combat tutorials, and the only holdover of that era was Runescape (which managed to be far more than a Baldur's Gate clone thanks to its robust crafting system).
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• Strong Bad does this quite often towards Telltale Games in Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and its making-of mockumentary Behind The Bad (and eventually carried over in Poker Night at the Inventory), usually complaining about how they never follow his idea of the "perfect" Strong Bad video game. This, however, is subverted near the end of "8-Bit Is Enough" when the developers finally made an albeit lo-res polygon render of a concept sketch from Strong Bad for the episode's final battle, and Strong Bad couldn't be more happy about it.
• Nitrome did this and a bit of Self-Deprecation with their 100th game, Nitrome Must Die. Example: in one level, the whiteboard in the background shows ideas for a new game... with a deadline of 8 hours.
• Crossing over with Take That, Audience!, Valve Software pokes fun at a specific type of Team Fortress 2 modders (*cough*pony*cough*) in this page. This was after it was discovered that Valve CEO Gabe Newell watches the show.
• In the Portal 2 Game Mod Portal Stories: Mel, Virgil says that test chambers usually need to be tested three times before they're finalized, and that apparently, "some people just can't count further than that".
• Ultima: In Ultima V, "ELECTRONIC ARTS" is found in the profanity filter file. In Ultima VI, the pirates are named after Electronic Arts employees Trip Hawkins, Bing Gordon, Stewart Bonn and Joe Ybarra. In Ultima VII, Elizabeth and Abraham form the initials EA, and the cube, sphere and tetrahedron generators match the square, circle and triangle of the EA logo. The cube, sphere and tetrahedron appear in the morphing object in Ultima VIII.
• Paper Mario: Sticker Star falls victim to the You All Look Familiar trope heavily — almost every generic NPC is a Toad, with the only rare distinguishing characteristics being different-colored spots on their mushroom caps. In a sub-franchise renowned for its creative and engaging characters, this... did not go over well with the fanbase. It seems the American English localizers aren't any happier about it, either, judging from a throw-away line in the follow-up, Paper Mario: Color Splash:
  Rescue V Member: Mario, sir! I'm a huge fan! Thanks for taking the time to talk to a normal Toad like me with no unique traits or discernable characteristics!
• You can find some programming Claptraps in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!. Dialogue includes:
  Invalid - I've just decided that's a feature!
  Won't fix, won't fix, won't fix - gosh, this is easy!
  Hmm...what do I name THIS file? Ah, screw it...nobody's gonna see it anyway!
  F*** - ship it!
  More like Memelands 2. More like Memelands, the Pre-Memequel. More like Bordermemes. More like meme meme meme meme meme meme meme...meme.
• Life Is Strange, published by Square Enix, has a running gag about Max being a colossal fan of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the notorious flop of a movie that bankrupted Squaresoft and forced them into the Enix merger.
• The fan-mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Falskaar, was made by creator Alexander Velicky as a sort of job-application for Bethesda; in spite of that, however, it notably takes a few jabs at the vanilla game, most prominently mocking the infamous "arrow in the knee" comment to the point that bandits declare they won't shoot you in the knee.
• Final Fantasy VII Remake does this Played for Drama with its subplot about ubiquitous cartoon character Stamp, who has been adopted by Avalanche as an ironic symbol due to the character appearing in Shinra's war propaganda. Considering Tetsuya Nomura had recently come off a Development Hell situation caused by a creator that develops ubiquitous cartoon characters and had a disturbing relationship with war propaganda, and that Nomura stated his Creator's Favorite was Barret, it's difficult not to incorporate some commentary on that into Barret's mixed feelings about using the symbol of the little cartoon dog.
• You can destroy EA's logo in one level of Boom Blox.
• The game Bugsnax has one from a meta-perspective, the Launch Trailer presents a review from The Onion that states it "Looks like[...]honestly[...]one of the[...]best games for PS5." What's hidden behind the ellipses?
  "Looks like shit honestly but for a window of several weeks it will be one of the nine best games for the PS5."
• After you complete the puzzle in Rugrats: Search for Reptar, you get to play as Reptar and destroy an entire city. One of the buildings Reptar can smash has the THQ logo on it.
• The True Final Boss of Dynamite Headdy is a greedy executive who wants to make a sequel to Headdy's adventure where even more chaos befalls Headdy's world. Headdy proceeds to beat the snot out of him and his lackeys.

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