I’ve recently fallen down a rabbit hole of fake video games. Not fake like fraud, but fake like art; games that don’t exist to play, but do exist to tell their stories. I’m super into it but finding more is kinda difficult, so here we are!
What fake games do you like? Why do you like them? Pictures, links, videos, whatever.
I really enjoyed Petscop (video 1/25 linked) and Valle Verde (video 1 linked, Spanish with subtitles), both series are let’s play style, exploring fake games to tell their stories. Petscop is much more narratively involved, and tells a great story (you’ll probably want an explainer video afterwards… it’s involved) while Valle Verde is more ghost-in-the-machine horror.
I found this rabbit hole through this video, from Super Eyepatch Wolf about fake video games, why they are made and how they “work” as an art form. Their content is weirdly enjoyable to me, and pleasingly entirely too long. Plus they have their own fake video game.
Edit for clarity: Fake video games is a super broad category. Pictures with gameplay hud that implies a video game, videos of gameplay or cutscenes styled after games count (even those weird live action “games” people record for TikTok count), books or stories that describe gameplay for games that don’t exist count, even soundtracks modeled after game sound tracks count. So if it’s a game or part of a game that doesn’t exist, it counts!
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.
A couple of extra things about this.
The episode was co-authored by William Gibson of all people. The fact that one of the key authors that gave us cyberpunk as a genre, went on to write a painfully mediocre TV episode about virtual reality, still leaves me kind of stunned.
WRT to “live-action standing-in for VR”, it can be done artfully. Avalon does a great job of using practical effects and creative set locations to portray cyberspace. Also: there’s a lot of run-and-gun here, and nobody stands around. Which is to say: they really whiffed hard on the x-files episode, as there’s clearly a better way to do this.
I’d say this mostly failed on the direction side. Less budget in VFX and more in action could have made a lot of difference.
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 in it. 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.
That sounds like x-files, and I’m not super surprised lol