< Hilarious in Hindsight

Hilarious in Hindsight/Video Games

This image has been around since 2008.
  • The age-verification questions for the first Leisure Suit Larry, released in 1987, include:

O. J. Simpson is
a. an R & B singer.
b. under indictment.
c. embarrassed by his first name (Olivia).
d. no one to fool with.
(The correct answer is d.)

  • The arcade game Michael Jackson's Moonwalker might be weird enough, but it just gets sillier (or creepier) each year: You touch kids (in the video game sense, but the fact they are at the height of Michael's crotch does not help) to gain points and powerups (and in home version, you cannot advance unless you get all the kids, which could be... hiding), or touch Bubbles the Chimp to get a super cyborg transformation. And then there's the dance attack: MJ randomly does one of three dances, and it wipes out all the enemies on the screen.
    • For a lighter example of this that appears only in the arcade Moonwalker game, there are three players, each with a different color of the Smooth Criminal getup. One is the classic white suit with blue shirt, another is red with a white shirt. The third player not only gets Michael wearing a black suit with a red shirt, very similar to the outfit from the much later released You Rock My World video... but also has a lighter skin tone than the other two, though not quite as light as it was in the video.
  • The plot of Metal Gear Ghost Babel, written long before 4chan even crawled out of the memetic primordial soup, repeatedly refers to an evil Chessmaster type only known as "Anonymous," upon whom Black Chamber have vowed vengeance. Clearly, they really don't forgive.
  • Late in La-Mulana, Lemeza gets the Crystal Skull. Lemeza already being a thinly-veiled copy of Indiana Jones, this was made all the more appropriate after the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
  • Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!. A guy called Little Mac takes down big brutal Iron Mike while he was in his prime. Later on, Buster Douglas comes in...
  • Playing Chrono Trigger nowadays (a game possibly best known for its excellent soundtrack), you can't help but feel that the introduction to Robo's theme song sounds a lot like Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". In a Let's Play of the game, the section where Robo first appears got quite a few comments accusing the player of pulling a Rickroll on them. This has been taken to its logical conclusion.
  • On April Fool's Day 2006, Gamespot made a fake news post called Revolution will take lead in 2010. The Wii went on to become the market leader of this generation (in sales, if not in dominant third party support).
    • "An overwhelming majority of industry analysts have stated that the favorite to win the next-gen console battle will be the PlayStation 3, with the remaining experts saying that Microsoft's Xbox 360 will take advantage of its head start to market, making it tough to beat." also turned out to be completely correct: The 360 enjoyed a significant advantage early on, but the hardware troubles, utter lack of exclusives late in its life, total failure to sell in Japan and the PS3 dropping in price lead to the PS3 taking a narrow lead near the end.
    • "The higher costs to develop for [the Play Station 3 and Xbox 360] will be passed on to consumers." - This was before the price of the Play Station 3 was announced, which was FIVE HUNDRED NINETY-NINE US DOLLARS.
    • "I've heard about the controller and some of the projects Nintendo is working on... and I heard from a source that there are already builds of the Revolution's handwriting technology. Gamers will eventually use the controller to 'write' answers..." - Gamespot must have been giving Nintendo ideas.
    • "I think [Nintendo] finally [is] giving people what they want and continuing to give them things they never thought of." - Surprisingly, they're still doing exactly that.
    • Best of all: "Games are meant to be one thing—fun." - This line would be the one thing that Nintendo would repeat for the coming years.
    • Yes Wii Can!
    • Similarly, a later April Fools day Home Page said they had a "preview" for a PSP version of Rock Band. About a year later... Rock Band Unplugged appears!
  • Listen closely to the introductions to these 1980's walkthrough videos of Pac-Man and E. T. for the Atari 2600. They're pretty funny given their infamy since then.
  • A tombstone in the English translation of the original NES version of the original Final Fantasy I reads "Here lies Erdrick" (though it said "Here lies Link" in the Japanese version) poking fun at the then-rival Dragon Quest series, referring to the legendary hero in the first three games. Several years later, Final Fantasy publisher Square merged with Dragon Quest publisher Enix, resulting in the two series being published by the same company. Incidentally, later translations of the game directly translated the engraving on the tombstone, having it read "Here lies Link" as in the Japanese version, losing the joke present in the original translation (although the PlayStation version says 'Erdrick').
    • Even the name Final Fantasy counts, since it was Square (facing possible bankruptcy) decided that its "final" game would be a "fantasy" RPG. And now the series won't end.
  • In Ace Combat Zero, there is reference made to a "Sleeping King". Thanks to this video, which plays on the naming similarity between the homeland of the antagonists of AC0 and those of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, it has become amusingly prophetic when you consider Vivio/the Saint King from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, which was released some time after the previously mentioned titles and video. "It's one heck of a coincidence" indeed!
    • Also, consider the voice actors for Pixy and PJ and their roles... including Code Geass. Pixy, flying a plane based on Arthurian legend, impales PJ's plane through the cockpit with a laser beam, right before the Mission Zero. In most cases their viewpoints are reversed; PJ believes in fighting for peace, where as a more cynical Pixy believes PJ to be naive.
  • Speaking of Nanoha, in Armored Core, your Mission Control is voiced by Maaya Sakamoto. Not quite so in the very first game, where the predominant voice you'll hear is none other than... Yukari Tamura. This includes her voice in the "Standard" type Computer-equipped heads and as some operators in several missions. She even did a role as a disembodied voice stuck in a loop playing in a particularly creepy stage. Upon realizing the voice, it may or may not become a Nightmare Retardant.
  • In Tales of Symphonia, released August 2003, the best title to earn for one of the characters, Kratos, is "War God".
  • In Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, the Villain Protagonist Arthas runs into a bunch of dwarves who are pissed off about him killing their prince previously. Having thought the bunch of them are dead, he asks "doesn't anyone stay dead anymore?", kills the lot of them and moves onward. In World of Warcraft, not only are the angry dwarves brought back from the dead but so is the prince whose death made them angry in the first place, making Arthas' line seem prophetic.
    • It goes back even further than that: In Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, when Arthas first meets Tichondrius, he says "What trickery is this? Mal'Ganis! I don't know how you survived, but I'll...", and then in World of Warcraft we learn that Mal'Ganis has indeed survived. And managed to survive that encounter with the player to boot.
    • The Alliance head of the church is Archbishop Benedictus, he was there since World of Warcraft started (which means before the pope election), and it just happen that pope Benedictus XVI has a similar name.
    • The undead boars in Borean Tundra can give you the Swine Flu debuff. When the outbreak hit the media, people started spamming a link to the in-game disease in chat channels across several servers.
    • Upon the completion of a certain quest, an NPC in Stormwind delivers this line: "The Defias Brotherhood, you say? Well, you're certainly the bearer of wonderful news, aren't you? Next you're going to tell me that Deathwing is still alive and attacking the city." As it turns out, Deathwing is still alive, and attacking Stormwind is one of the first things he does after his return in Cataclysm.
    • Speaking of Cataclysm, the epic-rarity sword known as Cataclysm's Edge was released back in The Burning Crusade expansion. Despite the fact, it bears the same striking appearance and color scheme as Deathwing himself, and its name alone should be enough to clue people in on the correlation.
    • The best Warcraft example goes all the way back to the original game, Orcs & Humans, with its intro narration saying "Welcome to the World of Warcraft." Foreshadowing at its finest!
  • The third game in the Disgaea series has a battle with Prism Red in which he says something about recruitment and teens with attitude (followed by the usual response). This scene becomes much funnier in the US version when you realize that Johnny Yong Bosch, the VA for Almaz, was also known as Adam Park.
    • Almaz's comment about wanting to be Prism Blue becomes funnier due to Johnny Yong Bosch playing Prism Blue in the Fuka Desco Show.
    • In a similar instance, the battle against Prism Red in the first Disgaea is a bit ironic, as Laharl's English VA is also known as the English voice of Rita Repulsa.
  • There was apparently a PC game released in Europe in the early 1990s called Luigi & Spaghetti. The latter is a weird looking rainbow-colored worm, the former a mustached man who bears a strong resemblance to a more famous Luigi. Certain people understandably find this hilarious.
  • In the supposedly tense opening cinematic of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the US president grabs a red phone with "Moscow" on it next to one that says "Tokyo." This becomes excellent with the release of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, where time travel retcons in an Empire of the Rising Sun.
  • In Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour, there is a US Aircraft Carrier named USS Reagan. Note that this was way back before the real USS Reagan is named.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eraser is a story about Raiden trying to kill Big Boss in the past in order to make himself the main character of the series. At the end, he fails miserably and Rose tries to console him by saying, "there's going to be a 5, right?" Funny at the time, because Hideo Kojima had loudly said he wouldn't make any more MGS games. Funnier when the "NEXT" promotional campaign started, hinting at MGS5. Funnier still when the main character of the next one seems to be Raiden - but it's not called MGS5.
  • It's really funny to play through the Happy Happyists house in EarthBound while thinking of Summer Glau in Firefly. "Hands of blue, two by two..."
    • For that matter, the original Japanese version might have been satirizing the KKK, but the cult thing becomes infinitely more hilarious now when you consider them to be Scientologists.
    • In the original Mother 2, the mayor of Onett was named G.H. Pirkle, or George Herbert Walker Pirkle. To sever the connection, the English localization changed it to B.H. Pirkle - which, ironically enough, makes him Barack Hussein Pirkle nowadays.
    • One added to the American version - as Americans wouldn't find strawberry tofu a product of a Cordon Bleugh Chef like the Japanese would, the item was instead translated as "Trout Ice Cream." Years later, another Japanese import would demonstrate just how terrible of an idea that would be.
  • The roster of an Amiga fighting game Shadow Fighter (released in 1994) featured a black basketballer and a faqir. These guys might as well be Kazaam's parents.
  • Tales of the Abyss
    • A rather serious speech by Van ("Master Bad Touch")about people consulting fortune-tellers to decide what to eat for breakfast becomes retroactively funny when watching the fortune-telling episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Guess what Katara does?
    • Jade asking Luke, why so serious?
  • Kingdom Hearts: Riku used to be a nice boy but after he gets amazing evil/dark/killing powers everything changes. Riku meets a dead guy who gives him those powers. Riku does evil things but thinks he's a good guy. Riku has a creepy evil laugh that makes players to fear. His voice actor voices another well known Anti-hero, Light Yagami.
  • Might be intentional on the creators' part: Mega Man ZX Advent featured an unlockable Mini Game, Mega Man a, all in 8-bit, styled after the original series of games. A few months later, Mega Man 9 was released, in all its Retraux glory.
    • Another one, this scene from Super Adventure Rockman has Quick Man save the life of Mega Man from Shadow Man, who throws shurikens at Mega Man, predating Naruto by a few years, where almost the exact same thing happens in the first chapter.
  • Speaking of, the Mega Man Battle Network games, for a series developed in 2001, had disturbingly accurate predictions of a lot of 21st century technology. In a time where 600 MHz was a decent processor speed, 40GB was a decent hard drive size for a desktop, most data was stored inside your computer, most laptops didn't have built-in wifi, and when they did, the internet's speed was hardly impressive, the series had all computers in the world connected to each other via the internet (Internet becoming viable for regular people, and wireless outside the home), applications mainly being run by accessing them from the internet (Cloud computing), computers in everything, most of which can access the internet, giant, paper-thin TVs you can mount on the wall, handheld touch-screen devices that, despite being pocketable, could easily access the internet, check your email, receive phone-calls, get messages, run programs, and generally act like a miniature computer (Modern smartphones), and cyberterrorism actually being able to do more than inconvenience tech support for a few hours (Modern cyberterrorism). The later handheld devices even looked like Apple products.
  • In Persona 3, when Mitsuru signs your character up for the student council, the game tells you to see your homeroom teacher. Specifically, it tells you to see Ms. Toriumi and "let her know you're interested." with the emphasis on "interested". This turns funny when, later on, you learn that Ms. Toriumi is the Love Interest you met on an online game.
    • The transfer student Ryoji Mochizuki, Kidanova and Chick Magnet, gets his foot painfully stomped on by an angry Yukari, and "punished" by Mitsuru for peeking in the open-air bath. He is also the projected avatar of Death itself, but nobody knew that at the time. This knowledge makes those scenes even funnier in retrospect, especially for his reactions.
    • One of Elizabeth's requests asks the main character to let her borrow a handheld game from Junpei. However, upon playing it, she believes it is evil because it makes people play it for hours upon hours. Persona 3 would be ported onto the PSP a few years later.
    • Maybe it's not hilarious per se, but the constant worrying on the news about the yen falling against the dollar is kind of amusing when in fact Japan ended up with the exact opposite problem (during the time frame of the game, the yen kept going up, and is now, in 2010, so strong that other countries are considering Japan too expensive to trade with, leading the government to have to think of a way to bring it back down). ... well, maybe that one only works for people who live in Japan.
  • In Resident Evil 5, during your final battle with Albert Wesker, he at one point, shouts, "THE HUMAN RACE REQUIRES JUDGEMENT!!!!" Chris replies, "And you're gonna judge us? Did you get all your ideas from comic book villains"? Two years later, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came out, both Chris and Wesker are in, and according to the game's Excuse Plot, Wesker is teaming up with Dr. Doom, who of course, is a comic book villain.
  • This boss from Persona 4 has become much more amusing with the news that Atlus was going to publish the North American version of 3D Dot Game Heroes.
  • A while after Catherine was announced, a fan drew Kanji (voiced by Troy Baker) and Rise (voiced by Laura Bailey) from Persona 4 as Vincent and Catherine. Now the game is set for release in America, guess who's who?
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, one of the "special generic" characters you can recruit is a Hunter with the name Cheney. FFTA came out in the States mid/late 2003, long before the infamous hunting accident involving Dick Cheney and Harry Whittington. Similarly, one of the Missions is requested by one "Cheney, Hunter". (They might be the same guy.)
  • In Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, the intro music is called "Across The Border". With so many characters on the Tatsunoko side unknown to most Western audiences, hardly anyone expected it to leave Japan. But then...
  • One of the page quotes on this wiki describes a Munchkin as one who, on being told that this is a game about politics and intrigue in 17th century Italy, asks to play a Ninja. Then came Assassin's Creed II.
  • Street Fighter's Dan Hibiki was based on Ryo Sakazaki and Robert Garcia. More than a decade later this happens.
  • In the Backyard Baseball series, Barry Bonds gets fatter every game, with his stats getting better, and is removed from the series after 2003. Then the exact same things happened in real life.
  • In one level of Max Payne 2, Max is assisted by a fat, balding, bearded old hobo who claims to be an ex-cop. In 2009, teaser images of Max Payne 3 showed the title character as fat, balding, bearded, and he is no longer a cop.
  • "Dear Mario: Please come to the castle. I've baked a cake for you. Yours truly, Princess Toadstool Peach."
  • One of the Heavenly Rewards that can appear in Afterlife is Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim Sim, described as the opportunity for a blessed soul to control a galaxy from the smallest microbe to the largest space races. The building is a hand holding a orb containing a spiral galaxy. Cue Spore...
  • In Final Fantasy VII, the war between nature and industrialization and bad energy sources in prominent, as huge reactors suck the limited life force out of the planet creating irradiated wastelands and make loads of pollution, and sometimes explode, causing huge disasters. These seem to be metaphors for fossil fuel power and nuclear power, respectively. However, nuclear power will probably never create deserts resembling areas hit by nuclear missiles, and it really only causes meltdowns if the people involved with working and creating the plant are being really stupid, which doesn't really happen too much. Also, while Mako power seems to allude to the problems caused by trying to obtain and burn fossil fuels, oil and coal are exactly what the characters support as an energy source after Mako power is deemed bad throughout the world. This wouldn't be all that bad, but the big nuclear meltdowns in the past were discovered to be caused by human ignorance making small issues become big, and fossil fuels are said to be responsible for one big bad thing: Hollywood Global Warming.
    • One must wonder if a future game in the Compilation will feature the cast watching the world hit Peak Oil and scrambling to turn the Mako reactors back on.
  • If you're going for the bad ending in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, just try to fall victim to Richter's Hydro Storm today without laughing.
    • Another good one in the same game: The best cloak you can equip in the game has the simple description: "Black cape for vampires." Its name? Twilight cloak.
  • In Okami, fish get a relatively bad treatment, being food and the basis of a fishing minigame, as it turns out, the final boss is a fish in a mecha, a really dangerous mecha.
  • Penny Arcade once made a comic about Dual-Wielding wands. In Torchlight, you can do just that.
  • In perhaps what is better called a Take That in Hindsight moment; two NPCS in Baldur's Gate, Palin and Sarah, debate which local gang to join: a gang of thugs who rob & murder for money, or a group of ultra-capitalists who want to take over the world.
  • In 2007, a Touhou fan artist whipped up this parody of Apple iPod ads, in reference to Sakuya's memetic A-Cup Angst. Two and a half years later...
    • This parody says that Sakuya is on the PC side... Is Apple specifically courting her as a customer?
    • "Space Megaforce! Presented by To(u)ho(u)."
      • And in the Japanese version, the hardest difficulty is called Lunatic. We're talking about a game that precedes Touhou by four years.
    • Also there's this picture, which mocks ZUN's hilariously bad artwork, that dates from around 2007. One year later, the character on the right was introduced.
    • There's also the matter of Alice Margatroid controlling a doll called "Shanghai". "Team Shanghai Alice"???
    • As an in-game example, there's Kogasa Tatara. She's the Stage 2 boss of Undefined Fantastic Object, and as such appears early enough to be part of the demo. She's seen to be rather weak and has an apparently worthless power of "surprising people". And she's not even very good at it. Play all the way through the game, though, and you discover that she's also the EX Stage Mid Boss. Surprise!
    • The story of Primeus. In the game engine MUGEN, there was a Joke Character named Primeus. The intro to the character would be of Touhou's Yukari Yakumo walking into the screen...and then a Giant Fish From Nowhere suddenly knocks her out from behind. Though this was funny in itself, it became even funnier when a giant fish did appear in a canon Touhou fighting game.
    • Remember Youmu's theme? It's called "Hiroari Shoots a Strange Bird ~ Till when?" and is based off of a Japanese epic. That strange bird was a nue, a shapeshifter. Cue Nue Houjuu later appearing.
    • In the end of EWI 23 so did Kogasa appear next to Myouren's grave, then Ten Desires was released.
  • 4 years before doing the "more cowbell" sketch for Saturday Night Live, Christopher Walken appeared in an FMV adventure game titled Ripper, which featured the Blue Oyster Cult song "Don't Fear The Reaper" as its theme music. The bit with the cowbell even plays just as Walken's name appears on the opening credits.
  • At one point during agentjr's Let's Play of Call of Duty 4, agentjr's ramblings include the quote "And that's why you're gonna get betrayed one day...I promise you that - it might not be me, but it better be someone." It made sense in context, but 3 months later Modern Warfare 2 was released, and you all ought to know what happens next.
    • Making his rant even funnier, the context of the above quote is agentjr talking about what would happen if Khaled Al-Asad was part of the task force hunting him. A similar situation happens in Modern Warfare 2: TF 141 spends the greater part of the game hunting Makarov and being directed by Shepherd — and it is implied at the end that Shepherd and Makarov have been working together for the whole game.
  • From a different Let's Play: The third video of baldurk and co.'s LP of Left 4 Dead had baldurk, playing as Bill, get ambushed and killed by zombies before he could make it into the safe room at the very end. The last words of the video are EthanSteele commenting "Sometimes, you have to make sacrifices." Left 4 Dead 2 had just come out as this video was posted, and fans of the game all know what happened to Bill (again) in its Downloadable Content.
  • At one point in Mass Effect, Ashley says, "Look at that monster! Its main gun could rip through any ship in the Alliance fleet!" Then the Alliance saves their asses later on.
    • Combining the two memes of "Ah, yes, Reapers," with "My name is Bolo Santosi." gives us "My name is Bolo Santosi. I am the leader of the immortal race of sentient starships known as the Reapers."
    • In Mass Effect 2, you learn from Legion that the True Geth's purpose is to build a Dyson Sphere to upload themselves onto. Considering that Legion is voiced by D. C. Douglas, AKA Albert Wesker, the Geth are essentially planning COMPLETE. GLOBAL. SATURATION.
    • The DLC's for game 2 cause an amusing moment because, if you play them after completing the main storyline, you are being helped by the Illusive Man after, depending on your choices during the game, you've essentially stolen the Normandy 2, caused the defection of a large chunk of Cerberus personnel including one of his top lieutenants to you, and blew up the Collector base he desperately wanted. He's obviously not one to hold a grudge.
    • There's an amusing Easter Egg in Mass Effect 2 when you launch probes at a certain planet. Guess what NASA is planning on doing.
    • Each of the three background options for Commander Shepard has an associated assignment in Mass Effect. The Earthborn assignment involves Finch, a member of a gang Shepard used to run with, trying to blackmail him/her into getting another member of the gang released from turian custody. If you choose to warn the guard about the gang, and then choose the right conversation options with Finch- for example, not just shooting him- he calls Shepard out for being "in bed" with the turians. For extra potential hilarity, Garrus (the turian squad member) can be brought along for the assignment. Guess which non-human squad member gets upgraded to a potential love interest in the second game!
    • Back in Mass Effect 1, when Ashley asks Shepard which side of the cheek to kiss a turian, if Shepard told her that wouldn't be necessary, Ashley will then jokingly reply "You never know, Commander." Cue the Relationship Upgrade with Garrus in Mass Effect 2.
    • One for Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic. Carth and Kaiden often acted as the "voice of conscience" in the party, arguing for light-side / Paragon actions. Now, their mutual voice actor is playing in Once Upon a Time...as one of the ultimate "voices of conscience," Jiminy Cricket!
  • On the topic of Pokémon, watch this. Now read this. And the guy who made the video? He got to play someone in the show!
  • The Games Machine, an Italian PC gaming magazine, has made several faux reviews as April Fool jokes in the 1990s, only for similar games to actually come out some time later.
    • 1993: Monkey Island 3. Four years later, The Curse of Monkey Island came out.
    • 1995: Monolith, a sequel to The Sentinel. Three years later, Sentinel Returns came out.
    • 1996: Ghosts N Goblins 96, a remake of Ghosts 'n' Goblins with improved graphics. Two years later, a Ghosts 'n' Goblins emulator with interpolated graphics came out. Moreover, in 2001 and 2003, two sequels came out for the Playstation 2.
    • 1997: a Tomb Raider patch to show Lara Croft naked. Not even a year later, such a patch came out for real.
    • 1998: a PC version of Gran Turismo, with native Voodoo2 support, improved graphics and the ability to send cars to other people through email. Merely four months later, a Playstation emulator called PSEmuPro came out and actually allowed to do all that.
    • 1999: Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun 3D, a 3D game set in the world of Command and Conquer. Cue 2002 and Command & Conquer: Renegade.
  • In the Sega Game Gear version of Winter Olympic Games: Lillehammer '94, one of the American athletes is named "H.Montana". Face it, the only "H.Montana" you can think of nowadays is Hannah Montana.
  • In this post in a Doomworld forum thread about the Deus Ex Invisible War demo way back in 2003, the poster, responding to another poster stating that Duke Nukem Forever would be an "astronomical failure" if it were ever released, says that Duke Nukem Forever is fully funded by 3D Realms, who reaped quite a profit from Duke Nukem 3D, and goes on to say that although it's questionable whether they would recoup the costs of developing the game, "3D Realms will not go bankrupt if DNF doesn't sell well when it's released in 2009." The poster immediately following him replies to this with, "Looks like we have ourselves an optimist." Today, the second poster seems quite prescient. (Notice the irony is not lost on the first poster, who bumped the thread in 2010 specifically to call attention to it.)
    • As an added bonus; Gearbox Software ended up finishing and releasing the game, and now holds the rights to the Duke Nukem franchise. The company was founded by Randy Pitchford, a former 3D Realms employee who worked on Duke Nukem 3D.
    • This fan song about Duke Nukem Forever, written in 2000 but released in 2007, contains the verse "Duke Nukem or Max Payne, no wonder who's last", originally referring to how much more likely it was to see Max Payne 1 released than Duke Nukem Forever. In 2011, when the release date of Duke Nukem Forever has been announced and Max Payne 3 has been delayed again, the same verse acquires a whole new meaning.
  • One of Rikku's battle quotes in Final Fantasy X-2 when entering a fight with the Flak Python-type enemies, is "Snake? Snake?! Snaaaake!!" Rikku's voice actor, Tara Strong, later provided the voice for Elisa and Ursula in Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops and for Paz in Peace Walker. Ironically, Portable Ops and Peace Walker are the only two Solid games without some variation on the "Snake? Snaaaake!!" Game Over, meaning the only time Tara Strong got the chance to say the line was when she was playing Rikku.
  • In Def Jam: Icon, developed and published by EA Chicago, one of your men will proceed to get a hankering for "those fly-ass EA games" and you will have the option to shill out thousands in order to buy them in bulk and keep him happy. Icon's lack of success proceeded to shut down EA Chicago.
  • To promote the game Um Jammer Lammy, Sony produced CD of MilkCan's music. Then came Parappa the Rapper 2...
  • The cover for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10. Shortly afterward, it was revealed he cheated on his wife and lost most of his endorsement deals. For extra hilarity points, the tagline on the back of the box was "Feel the Drama."
  • In StarCraft: Brood War, one of Artanis' "pissed" quotes was "This is not Warcraft in space! It's much more sophisticated!" A few years later, Warcraft 3 came out with a verrrry familiar storyline if you take out the Orc campaign.
    • Even better, Artanis follows up with "I know it's not 3D!" Warcraft 3, of course, is.
    • Starcraft: Ghost's title has become even more hilarious since it's become Vaporware.
  • In the Dawn of War Dark Crusade expansion, when the Word Bearers attack the Blood Raven stronghold, on way Eliphas mocks Davian Thule is saying perhaps the he would mount his corpse on golden chair and make an idol of him. In Dawn of War II, something like that happens as Thule is nearly killed by the Tyranids and becomes a dreadnought, so his corpse is mounted somewhere.
  • "WE ARE NINTENDO. WE CHALLENGE ALL PLAYERS. YOU CANNOT BEAT US." Indeed, you cannot beat them at Nintendo Hard games... or, as of May 2010, at the top 3 game ratings of ALL TIME!
  • NBA Jam featured Bill Clinton as a secret character, quite a while before the US had a president with a noted interest in basketball.
  • Two iterations of Princess Zelda have disguised themselves as both a Ninja and a Pirate.
  • In Super Smash Bros Brawl Pit, of Kid Icarus, got an updated character design that, to many, looked remarkably like Sora from the Kingdom Hearts series. Fast forward to E3 2010, which we learn of a new Kid Icarus game, featuring the same design for Pit, being made by Masahiro Sakurai's (the creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros.) development team, which is called "Project Sora".
  • Monster Hunter Tri has a bit of one. The Guild Sweetheart occasionally says "You know, some hunters wish we'd get rid of the Quest Fee. Like the hunters who suck at their jobs. If they didn't mess up all the time, we wouldn't have to charge! Sheesh!" Guess what one of the things Ben Croshaw complains about in his Extra Punctuation article?
  • While all the endings of the WWF Wrestlemania arcade game are pretty ridiculous, the one for Razor Ramon/Scott Hall's oddly echoes the man's continual real life problems that have consumed him in the years since the game was released.
  • In April 2007, Game Informer released their annual April Fool's issue-within-an-issue, Game Infarcer. The cover claims that a new Metroid game was going to be developed by Team Ninja, giving it a Dead or Alive Xtreme look. 2 years later, at E3 2009, Metroid: Other M was being made by Team Ninja, but without all the intentional Fan Service.
    • Around the time Super Metroid was released, Yoshio Sakamoto did an interview about the game. There's a gem at the end that only gets funnier every time you see a negative review of Other M about the voice acting.

Sakamoto: From the beginning, it was decided that when the game begins, we wouldn't tell the whole story using text. The story had to be told in a minimal way. However, it wouldn't convey atmosphere. I thought the game's atmosphere was done completely through sound. I thought it would be good if we could do it like a silent movie.

  • In 1999, Monster Rancher 2 came out. One monster, the Radial Niton, looks like a bright red race car. It has a description that says, "In the ancient era, there was said to be a play called 'Cars.'" In 2006, an actual movie called Cars comes out, and the main character is a red race car.
  • There was some art about video game characters helping out with the BP Oil spill cleanup, such as Mario. Later, when the leak was fixed, The Colbert Report mentioned that the design was submitted by an anonymous plumber.
  • The single player in Half-Life 2 contained phrases like "I can't believe you made it here this quickly" (and several other variations of it), "We don't go to Ravenholm", "Follow Freeman", "Doctor Freeman, you really shouldn't be out there", "...but things would go so much faster if we had more people with your training" and many others. Then a Speed Run of that game was released...
  • In one sequence of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the computer TEC convinces Peach to disguise herself as an X-Naut and ask Grodus a question for him. In the process, she learns the X-Nauts' true goal. The first two lines upon her return to the computer room:

Peach: TEC! You terrible machine! So your goal is to conquer the world, is it?
TEC: Of course. After all, I was built for that purpose.

  • One of Unreal Tournament 2004's announcer messages is "Flawless Victory", which you obtain by winning a match without being fragged, giving up a flag capture, or what have you. It's pretty funny, since the two following games, Unreal Championship 2 The Liandri Conflict and Unreal Tournament III, were published by Midway Games, and in the former, Raiden was featured as a Guest Fighter.
  • In Godzilla: Unleashed, the San Francisco level has the Golden Gate Bridge destroyed. Guess which movie has a monster in San Francisco destroying the Golden Gate Bridge?
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, there is a news report about an app for the "iFruit" where you pee on it and it tells you if you're pregnant. Funny then, funnier after something very similar actually did come out later.
  • The Japanese commercial for Kirby's Adventure (Hoshi no Kirby: Yume no Izumi no Monogatari in Japan) featured a world partly made of yarn, and Kirby and the enemies are made of yarn. 17 years later...
  • One of the puzzles in Sam & Max: Situation: Comedy involved Sam winning Embarrassing Idol by using a 'Voice Modulator'. Mildly amusing in 2006. Hilarious after the 2010 UK media scandal about talent shows using Auto-Tune on their singers.
  • In Ben There, Dan That!, a Pastiche of LucasArts point-and-click Adventure Games, Dan idolises Indiana Jones, and Ben idolises Marty McFly, of Back to The Future (both of whom are Lucas-related characters). Telltale Games, a company formed from Yahtzee called LucasArts's 'cleverness division', made a Back to The Future Point and Click Game, making the reference be to Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and the Back to The Future game, instead, which makes a lot more sense as most of the other Shout Outs in the game are to Point And Clicks.
  • The intro to Professor Layton and the Curious Village brings up Lady Dahlia, followed by the line, "Well, Luke, a true gentleman never refuses the request of a beautiful lady." Then they announced Professor Layton VS Ace Attorney. Guess who else has experience being "gentlemanly" toward a beautiful woman named Dahlia.
    • Another Ace Attorney related one, though nothing happened after seeing the scene in question, aside from being reminded of old episodes of the Pokemon anime. Phoenix reactions, during JFA, upon hearing Maya say Edgeworth's name reminded people of Brock during the early episodes of the Johto saga/late Orange Islands: "Don't say that name!".
    • So we all thought She Hulk's ending in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was hilarious, right? The sheer Ho Yay involved would be a yaoi fangirl's dream come true, but we have to step back and ask why we witnessed two of our favorite lawyers acting gayer than usual. It is not a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo.
    • In case 1-2 (The Turnabout Sisters) Phoenix can press Gumshoe by asking him if murder victims usually have time to write the name of their killer. Obviously this was a rhetorical question, used to make a point, but Gumshoe's reaction [1] becomes hilarious when you get to case 2-1 in Justice for All—where another defendant, Maggey's, name was written by the victim.
  • Episode 277 of Secret of Mana Theater featured an army of flower enemies beating/chasing various enemies in a fortress, zombies included. Two years later, Pop Cap Games came out with Plants vs. Zombies. You make the call.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom 2 related: The infamous MAHVEL BAYBEE video acquires a whole new meaning, aside from the already ascended memes, when you consider that Marvel struck a deal with the NBA. Now Sentinel will remind you of the New York Knicks.
  • In the H.I.H. Live Action page, it's mentioned that anti-radiation medicine by the name of Ex-Rad has recently been developed. Players of the Fallout franchise should remember a similar drug called Rad-X quite well, first introduced over ten years prior.
    • Also, within the game, Arcade's quote about Agave and Mesquite Oh. If agave and mesquite were that miraculous, the locals would have figured it out a few thousand years ago. Cue Honest Hearts and the ability to introduce Nuka Cola and Sasparila back to the wasteland.
  • In Devil May Cry 3, the final Devil Arm that Dante receives (Beowulf, a set of gauntlets and greaves) allows him to whip out a string of physical combos homaging several famous martial artists (both real and fictitious), with many of these moves being evocative of the Street Fighter crew; he even uses variants of the Shoryuken (Rising Dragon), Shin Shoryuken (Real Impact), and Shinkuu Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku (Tornado). Dante's personality and sense of style (such as his preference for the color red) has had many fans likening him to a more Crazy Awesome version of Ken Masters. In 3, 4, and the anime, Dante is voiced by Reuben Langdon, the voice actor of Ken Masters in the dub of Street Fighter IV.
  • Tales of the World Radiant Mythology had a pre-order bonus disc called Lemon Gummi with several of the Tales (series) series heroes talking. At one point, they were asking for more spin-off ideas and a Dating Sim was suggested. Jade saw his role as that of the physics teacher and asked Luke to hand out some prints. Luke complained, saying he was the student council president and too high a position to do it. Jade voiced Himuro Reiichi in Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side in 2002 and Luke voiced Hikami Itaru in Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side 2nd Kiss in 2006.
  • In One [dead link] Mass Effect discussion, a person said: I could come up with some ties to Mass Effect from Norse myth if I had to lol. How about the Rainbow Bridge (Bifrost) connecting Earth with Asgard being a metaphor for the Mass Relay? Now, nearly three years ago, the Thor movie came out, and there is quite a bit of similarity between the devices.
    • Both even end up destroyed by the actions of the protagonist at the end of the series/movie.
  • There's a Mortal Kombat fangame made using MUGEN known simply as Mortal Kombat Project. The default roster includes all the characters from the 2D games, plus one original character, Hydro, who originated in the comics. While he was a human Lin Kuei who could control water in the comic, in the game he's a cyborg who can control ice, essentially making him a cyborg version of Sub-Zero. Then came Mortal Kombat 9 and Cyber Sub-Zero with a very similar movelist. This gets even better with the release of the his Klassic Costume DLC, a blue version of Cyrax and Sektor's appearance from 3. It looks exactly like the MUGEN Hydro.
  • Starting in Tekken 4, resident loudmouth Taekwondoka Hwoarang has a win pose where he sits down on his downed opponent's back and (with much boredom) tells them to shut up. From 5 onward, however, he instead asks, "Don't you have any special moves or something?" This is most likely a Shout-Out/Take That to Street Fighter, as Tekken is (relatively speaking) more realistically grounded in what its fighters can and cannot do (the quip still doubles as Hypocritical Humor, given some of the more supernatural characters in the series). A few years later, Hwoarang is confirmed to be on the roster of Street Fighter X Tekken. Should've kept your mouth shut, dude.
    • In SF fandom, Sagat was occasionally referred to as BOB SAGAT (as in Bob Saget). Now, in SFxT, you can play as Sagat alongside Bob from Tekken 6, meaning that Bob Sagat lives on.
  • The voice sets for the Dwarven Warden and their respective voices for the Reapers, many regard Sovereign as cold and calculating while Harbinger is a well of silly memes. Well Peter Jessop voices the cocky dwarf voice set while Keith Szarabajka voices the smart dwarf voice set.
  • From Nerf Now, strip 534, which was released about a day or two after the Uber Update. Now, have a look at one specific item that Valve added into Team Fortress 2 on the first of July, about a week after the Uber Update.
    • One comment on a pirate themed Team Fortress 2 cover art was about the Demoman getting a stump leg. Later ...
    • Pyro is know for being Ambiguous Gender and The Faceless. Quite fittingly, there's a 1964 thriller film called Pyro: The Thing Without a Face.
  • Some years ago, the sprite comic The Karnak Hates Everything Show made a twisted song parody of Disney's "It's a Small World" (see comic #28). The opening lines in particular ("It's a world of hate and a world of pain! It's a world where mis-er-y pours like rain!") became eerily accurate and appropriate out of context in late 2010...
  • In 2004, Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal introduced us to the Galactic President and his daughter Sasha, a pair of dark-furred Cezares. In 2008, the first black US president and his daughter Sasha entered the Whitehouse. Insomniac was on to something...
  • In South Africa, a toy store chain called Reggie's once sold a Famiclone under the name Reggie's Entertainment System. Several years later, a man by the name of Reggie would become president of Nintendo of America.
  • Home Front's timeline places North Korean leader Kim Jung-il's death in mid-2012 of a sudden stroke. In Real Life, he would be dead due to a sudden stroke with less than two weeks left in 2011.
  • In Final Fantasy IV, one of your party members is a Lunarian sage named FuSoYa. Any relation to Fus Ro Dah?
  • In Tokimeki Memorial 2, Homura Akai's favorite anime is a Super Robot series named GoDriller. She wears a piece of merchandise from it - a drill necklace. And this from a game that came out in 1999.
  • The quality of Left 4 Dead 2 is hotly debated among fans, but the most common criticism in terms of the game's overall difficulty and the bugs/glitches is that Valve hired horrible play testers and that they (the players themselves) would do a better job finding all the flaws and fixing them. Nearly 2 years later, Valve decides to release a custom campaign and all the Left 4 Dead 1 maps to Left 4 Dead 2 in the beta stages so that they can improve maps and squash bugs based on player feedback so the Cold Stream DLC is polished.
  • Related to Valve, the Half-Life: Opposing Force expansion pack featured a sniper rifle referred to as the M40A1, which in-game reloaded with a detachable magazine not present in the real-world gun. Fast-forward to 2009, and the USMC rolls out the M40A5, a later variant of that rifle that does load from detachable magazines.
  • In Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy, Kain Highwind, voiced by Liam O'Brien, gets called out by Lightning for his supposedly villainous actions. And then, in Final Fantasy XIII-2, Caius Ballad, also voiced by Liam O'Brien, makes his villainous actions clear to Lightning.
  • In Street Fighter games, Guile usually has his "Go home and be a family man." Victory Quote. His voice actor Travis Willingham is now currently married to Laura Bailey. Now he's a family man.
  • In Deus Ex, Jaime Reyes asks JC Denton: "Listen, JC - About your augmentations. You know they're preparing to roll out the technology worldwide, right?" to which he replies: "As long as I don't turn green and grow a pair of antennas, as I understand it." Shrek was released a year later. Technically, they're his ears, but it's still pretty funny.
  • The name of Doom 3 antagonist Dr. Betruger can also read as "a Doctor who commited a fraud" in German. The name is funny because in 2011, many famous Germans lost their doctor's degrees because they commited fraud in their doctoral theses.
  • Part of the reason the Donkey Kong arcade game was created was because Shigeru Miyamoto was a big fan of Popeye, but he couldn't get the rights to make a game based on it. In 1982, Nintendo got the rights from King Features Syndicate to create a Popeye arcade game (though the game is played differently than Donkey Kong).
  • Modern Warfare 2 featured the ability to call down a guided missile launched from a Predator UAV. Saints Row the Third featured the similar Reaper Drone, which allowed the player to watch from the perspective of said drone while launching either dumb-fire missiles or guided ones similar to the Predator. Around the same time, Modern Warfare 3 also features a Reaper UAV, which works a lot like the one from Saints Row.
    • Concerning the Fandom Rivalry between Call of Duty and Battlefield, it's rather funny that one of the default names for singleplayer bots in Battlefield 2, released two years before Call of Duty 4, was "J. Price". Moreso when the Battlefield 2: Special Forces expansion added the British SAS as a playable faction.
  • As a joke, someone created a fake National Geographic Magazine cover, featuring a cardinal photoshopped to look like the iconic Red Bird from Angry Birds. Later this year, National Geographic will release a tie-in book called Angry Birds: Fed Up, Feathered, and Furious—and none other than a cardinal is featured on the cover!
  • Nintendo Power has yet another example. The fifth issue (March/April 1989, back when it was bi-monthly) featured discussion of the AFD Reality System. Two of the games described for this include a game that would teach you how to cook and a game called Muttroid which would be all about how to care for a dog.
  • Katawa Shoujo has a meme since the demo days in which Lilly asks "Who's there? ... No answer, must be that deaf bitch", in reference to her rivalry with Shizune.[2] Late in her route in the full game, she asks Misha for some papers, then thanks her when she gets them. Lilly receives no reply, causing her to realize after a moment that it is Shizune, leading to a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming as the two set aside their differences.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog CD has one that happens within the game itself, depending on the version. The main boss theme in the Japanese and European versions of the original version as well as all versions of the 2011 remake of the game when the Japanese soundtrack is chosen over the American one has a sample from the song "Work That Sucker to Death" by Xavier looped as part of the lyrics played in an upbeat manner. A boss in the middle of the game has Sonic having to defeat Dr. Eggman by running quickly to make a conveyer belt wear down his current device until it explodes. In other words, for that boss Sonic really does have to work that sucker to death.
  • After over 10 years of Super Smash Bros Melee's release, in Fire Emblem: Kakusei, the imposter who claims to be Marth is revealed to be his descendant Lucina, who resembles Marth eerily well, but is a female. Compare to the known conception that many people who met Marth in Melee was very caught off by his feminine appearance and thought he was a woman.
  • There's an Intellivision game called Space Spartans. When the game came out, this would just have been one of the many games with "space" in the title that came out in the early 80s, albeit a strange one ("What's that? A Spartan in space? Was Marvin the Martian a Space Spartan?"), but gamers today hearing the title would probably think of something else.
  • Iori Yagami in King of Fighters was speculated by various fans to have Foe Yay with Kyo Kusanagi, The Hero due to the nature of their rivalry. In a rare case of both Hilarious in Hindsight and Harsher in Hindsight, Iori's Japanese Voice Actor, Kunihiko Yasui ends up playing Rospark the Floroid, whose lines definitively have a heaping of Foe Yay for Grey.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Lego City has been made real. Say hello to Lego City Undercover.
  • Tarou Yamada is a Guest Fighter in Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight. In a video displaying his super moves, Tarou Yamada uses Kinnikuman as a punching bag. In J-Stars Victory Vs., Tarou Yamada is in, but Kinnikuman is nowhere to be found. Guess Tarou Yamada fought Kinnikuman for that spot.
  • In Tony Hawk's Underground there's an objective to destroy the reelection signage for "mayor Jed", a play on then Governor of Florida Jeb Bush down to the design of the campaign signs. This joke aged horribly and wasn't too funny in the first place as outside of Florida few knew of Jeb as anything but "Governor of Florida" and "related to the Presidents Bush". This changed over a decade after the game's release when Jeb Bush made an ill done attempt to run for President with the exact same logo he used for his gubernatorial run (the one that was parodied in the game). During this campaign he was meek, uncharismatic and easily pushed around, prompting Donald Trump to dub him "low energy Jeb". Jeb quickly became a joke among both parties, and thanks to the internet his notoriety extends beyond the United States.
  1. ↑ Something along the lines of "Yeah! All the time in movies and stuff!"
  2. ↑ Lilly can't see Shizune, and Shizune can neither hear nor respond to "Who's there?"
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