Basic Trope: Video games often have crates.
- Straight: A video game Loud Planes has lots of crates scattered around. They usually contain 1 item per crate.
- Exaggerated:
- A video game Crate Pusher have crates as a major part of the gameplay mechanic and are everywhere.
- Sokoban
- Downplayed: Bob Badass and Alice Awesome, heroes of Troper's Duty, have a scene in a warehouse checking crates for useful supplies and the MacGuffin, but crates are otherwise insignificant.
- Justified:
- The game is set in a warehouse and the crates are on pallets with fork lifts nearby. They also contain items which take up pretty much all the space inside the crate.
- Of course there's stuff in the crates. The entire purpose of a crate is to be used as a container! That's why they make crates!
- Inverted:
- An allotment of video games are shipped to the retailers in crates.
- The crates attack the player. When the player dies, he drops all of his items, which the crates then pick up and use.
- Subverted: What looked like crates were actually drawings on a painted backdrop.
- Double Subverted: But they can be broken like other objects, and sometimes does contain items.
- Parodied: The main character of Crate Pusher can even fall in love and marry a crate! note
- Zig Zagged: The crates in Loud Planes contain widely variable things, ranging from more crates to power-ups that themselves can be broken open to reveal more power-ups or, occasionally, more crates. Sometimes crates attack you for trying to break them. The joke boss is made of crates and seeks revenge for your crate-breaking.
- Averted:
- Loud Planes doesn't have crates.
- Bokosan, a Block Puzzle, has you push around cardboard boxes.
- Enforced: The dev team needed the game to be set in a series of airplane storage hangers and, for realism's sake, had to include a lot of crates.
- Lampshaded: "So large a crate for such a small item?"
- Invoked: The Big Good leaves supplies in crates, knowing Emporer Evulz's guards would never think to look there, and that the player would.
- Exploited:
- The Genre Savvy Big Bad seeds crates all around the world, hoping you'll open them, unleashing evil unto the world, just so he can guilt trip you into a Heroic BSoD with The Reveal.
- Or he couldn't open them himself.
- Defied: A sign in the Genre Savvy Big Bad's warehouse has a message dated a week prior saying "All crates removed by order of the Big Bad in case of heroic trespass".
- Discussed: Your radio support tells you "If you find yourself in need of medical attention or ammo, just break open a crate. They're everywhere".
- Conversed: A reviewer mentions a game's Start-to-Crate time.
- Deconstructed: Destroying crates led to the main character of Loud Planes to be arrested by the warehouse authority.
- Reconstructed: There is a cutscene of him paying off his crime by boxing power-ups in crates for said authority.
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