The Evil Farming Game

I"m gonna get the details really vague, Whang actually took notes, go watch his videos on the subject. The story goes something like this:

Someone turned up to r/lostmedia or something asking about this video game they sweared they played. It was a farming game like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley, but the player character murdered his wife, and in addition to tending the crops, you have to move the corpse around to hide it from the cops, and also there was a fishing minigame.

Cue a couple of "I think I have it on an old hard drive"s later, and it turns out that it didn’t exist as a game. Some game streamer had kind of made it up as a stream of consciousness while playing some other game. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a game where…”

Bloggo’s Pow

I learned this story from Ashens. Back in the day, a British anti-piracy group called FAST or the Federation Against Software Theft ran a campaign of comic stips with an anti software piracy theme. Imagine Don’t Copy That Floppy by way of Jack Chick. They apparently offered a bounty on anyone who was committing software piracy, so they published cartoons of kids turning in their math teacher because he copies video games, etc.

In one cartoon, they find a vendor at “the market” who is selling pirated games. One of our badly drawn heroes says “These games look pirated. And this one definitely is” and he holds up a box labeled “Bloggo’s Pow.” According to Ashens, pirated games were thenceforth known as “Bloggos”

According to Ashens, FAST was first of all incorrect in the use of the word “theft” as at the time according to British law, copying a video game did not count as theft, because you didn’t deprive anyone of their property. Software piracy was a crime, but that crime wasn’t theft. He also made the point that the FAST tracts tended to either offer threats of punishment, or appeals to greed with the bounty they offered (which there’s no evidence was actually claimed). I mentioned Don’t Copy That Floppy, which features a famously cheesy rap dance component but it then settles down and goes for an empathy-based approach, they interview game programmers who say if everyone stole games, they’d have no income, which means they couldn’t afford to make games, they’d have to go find other work. And that worked a lot better.

The Game They Made Up In Playing Dangerous 2

Playing Dangerous is a movie probably best known today for being featured on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. It can be best summed up as “Die Hard, but the protagonist is a 10 year old boy.” It seems it was written and filmed as an R-rated movie, then edited to make it PG-13 (a man gets shot in the face in the first ten seconds of the film) and then marketed as if it’s a Home Alone ripoff. The kid is some intelligent beyond his years computer whiz named Stewart, which forms the basis of the sequel.

Playing Dangerous 2 slops back and forth between “Supergenius kid has an internship at a computer research company” and “10 year old honors student attends computer camp for 10 year old honors students.”

At one point, Stewart is hanging around the “lab” with his mentor character, Guy Who Works There, and they’re playing this video game that I guess they made. When you see the screen, the background looks like a 90’s arcade side scrolling beat-em-up, there’s a Score counter and an Energy meter in the upper corners, and Stewart is green screened in very prominently in the foreground shooting at the camera with a Nerf gun.

It does, and yet doesn’t, look like a video game. There doesn’t seem to be any gameplay, you can’t tell if it’s supposed to be a first-person shooter and Stewart is an enemy, or if Stewart is the player character and they made the weird choice to have him face the player. But, it does work as a thing a middle aged dude would come up with to occupy the attention of a kid he’s supposed to be teaching computers to, and it also works as what a mediocre film director thinks a computer game looks like. Obviously a film director would choose to have his star face the camera, he’s performing.

Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006

Kings of Power 4000000000%

ReBoot had a ton of these, but I’d really like to play the Mad Max-inspired racing game where cars range from the size of go-karts to armored semi trucks and 747 front ends mounted on tank treads.

Also, not a fake game, but a fake game accessory, I’d like to play with the Nintendo Power Glove from the movie The Wizard that is actually good and enjoyable to use.

CUUUUUUUUUUUUUBE

Coffee Run

To me it feels like a video game, but it tells a rather emotional story.

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The game Look Outside has a bunch of fake video games in it that your character can play to get XP and learn skills, and there’s some funny character interactions with them. Likewise the Sims series has games that your sims can play.

There’s also SBURB from Homestuck (which starts as a video game at least) and the various games from Kidd Radd, which I don’t know if that’s archived anywhere but I hope it is [EDIT: It is indeed!]

I love to hate the video game depicted in the X-Files episode First Person Shooter. It is about some kind of VR game that is so realistic that people die in real life. The single enemy NPC Maitreya is just too good at killing.

When they entered the game it looked just like real life. Except the most enticing gameplay they could think of was standing in front of each other and shooting all guns they had.

It was released in early 2000 so there should have been tons of games with enticing gameplay to pull from. But no, standing somewhere for a long time and shooting big guns is exactly how trained FBI agents would act.

1. Starfighter, obviously.

3. Sugar Rush and Fix it Felix Jr.

4. Does a tabletop game with an AI video DM count as a video game? If so:

If Sugar Rush looked as good as it does in Wreck-It Ralph, I think it’d be a fantastic kart racer.

Also Roy from Rick and Morty. Holy shit, a game that could compress time would be fucking insane, even as mundane as it is.

Aight, if there are no wrong answers I wanna mention a real old one I’ve had a soft spot for since childhood: The Dreamcast-like music video Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers.

There aren’t a ton of examples from pre-social media, I wonder if there are any others that people can think of that’re even older?

Edit: Actually reading a few there are some from the 90s, like Simpsons. I forgot all about them, lol.

Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada

If only because I would love to be recruited into space for beating a video game.

By far my favorite movie about a video game that doesn’t exist.

The Giant’s Drink from Ender’s Game always seemed really compelling to me. The emergent gameplay reacted to your state of mind and serving as some sort of arcane test of your mind.

“Cavern of the Evil Wizard” from the movie Big. It looked so cool to me as a child.

Polybius.