Part of what’s fun aboutvideo gamesbeing firmly entrenched in the public consciousness is that basic game concepts can be dreamed up for other kinds of media as plot points or framing devices.
Even if they’re not real games, if they appear in an important enough capacity in shows or movies we like, we tend to remember them and their mechanics almost as well as games we’ve actually played.
5 Big Video Game Movies Coming in 2025
2025 is set to bring a plethora of video game titles to the silver screen, including Minecraft, a return to Five Nights at Freddy’s, and more.
Some of these games are used as one-off subjects to drive the plot of a specific episode forward, while others can be entire settings in themselves, occasionally paired with the whole “trapped in another world” thing.
10Bonestorm
The Simpsons
In theSimpsonsepisode “Marge Be Not Proud,” Bart catches an ad for the hottest new fighting game on the market: Bonestorm. The advertising is pretty in-your-face, showing two massive, Goro-like combatants beating the stuffing out of each other while volcanoes erupt in the background. Buy it or go to Hell.
All the kids in Springfield immediately want this game, Bart included, though Marge isn’t having it, as she thinks it’s too violent and expensive.
Even Milhouse manages to snag a copy, immediately entranced by the game just from entering his name. Apparently, it’s got an eight-character limit, though, as “Thrillho” finds out.
In spite of all of that hype, Bonestorm didn’t seem to have much enduring appeal. Milhouse gets bored with it pretty quickly, shifting his attention to a cup and ball toy. Should’ve picked up Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge instead.
9Sugar Rush
Wreck-It Ralph
InWreck-It Ralph, the titulararcade game bad guybails on his arcade cabinet to find another game that will give him a heroic medal.
After swiping a medal from the game Hero’s Duty, he ends up getting launched out of the cabinet via an escape pod, landing in yet another cabinet: the sweets-themed racing game, Sugar Rush.
From a player’s perspective, Sugar Rush is a pretty typical arcade racer, not unlike racing games like Fast & Furious or Cruis’n. You pick a character, you race across candy-covered tracks, so on and so forth. Inside the game, things are a little more complicated. Every playable character needs to pony up a coin to participate, which they can only get by winning races themselves.
This includes Sugar Rush’s ruler, King Candy, though as we later learn, King Candy doesn’t actually exist. He’s really Turbo, formerly of the game TurboTime, having snuck into the cabinet and hacked it to instill himself as ruler.
Not a great idea on Turbo’s part; it would’ve only taken one call to the distributor for Mr. Litwak to realize his game had a character it shouldn’t.
8Space Paranoids
Prior to the events of the originalTronfilm, Kevin Flynn was originally employed by tech company ENCOM as a software engineer and game designer.
It was several of his games that would end up putting ENCOM on the map, one of the most notable being Space Paranoids.
We briefly see Flynn playing a Space Paranoids arcade cabinet in the film, in which the goal is to shoot down Recognizers flying in with a stationary turret. It’s apparently one of ENCOM’s most popular entries, which is why Flynn is so irritated that they stole his source code and released it without his input.
10 Horror Games That Play Like Slasher Movies
The bloodier the better!
Apparently, the elements that make up Space Paranoids were incorporated into the virtual world that makes up ENCOM’s computer system. This is why the MCP’s soldiers are flying around in Recognizers, capturing and intimidating other programs.
Space Paranoids is so integral to the ENCOM system code, that the copied instance of it that appears in Kingdom Hearts 2 still uses the same data, iconography, and even the name.
Ready Player One
In thedystopian sci-fi settingof the novel and movie Ready Player One, everything is just… awful.
Our protagonist, Wade, lives in a literal stack of motor homes, for goodness’ sake. It’s the kind of world that anyone would be eager to escape from, and luckily, they have an escape: The Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation, better known as OASIS.
OASIS is a fully immersive virtual reality game where you can do pretty much anything and everything. You can climb the tallest mountain, punch a dragon in the face, gamble away your life savings, and then do it all again tomorrow.
You can look however you want, fight whoever you want, and be whoever you want.
Part of what makes OASIS so appealing is that it is packed with nods to just about every movie, TV show, video game, and other assorted media ever made.
How this game is able to do this without incurring the mother of all copyright nightmares is a mystery, but presumably, every other licensee and publisher gave the okay when they realized it was objectively the most popular thing on the face of the Earth.
6Roy: A Life Well Lived
Rick and Morty
In theRick and Mortyepisode “Mortynight Run,” the titular duo visit Rick’s favorite interstellar barcade, Blips and Chitz, after selling a dangerous weapon to a contract killer. As one does.
Shortly after entering, Rick plops Morty down in a random game and starts it up, and suddenly Morty finds himself living the entire lifespan of a boy named Roy.
This turns out to be an arcade game titled Roy: A Life Well Lived, the most literal life simulator game ever made. Thanks to time dilation shenanigans and memory suppression, you may live out Roy’s entire life from childhood to death in the span of about 15 minutes. You even get tickets for it!
Apparently, Rick’s a big fan of this game, and a practiced player of it. He’s able to verbally respond to Morty while playing it, taking Roy off the grid while he does, and generally maintain his sense of self.
He’s even got a bootleg version of it called “Troy: A Life Lived” stashed in the garage, which you canplay yourself in Virtual Rick-Ality.
5Sword Art Online
Sword Art Online
By the beginning of the originalSword Art Onlineseries, FullDive virtual reality was a firmly established science, but still only in its early stages.
The reason the initial launch of SAO was such a big deal was that it was the very first FullDive MMORPG, not to mention that it was accompanied by the release of the second generation Argus NerveGear.
With SAO and the NerveGear, you could enter a fully simulated fantasy world with all five of your senses stimulated just like in real life. The game itself has all the trappings of a typical MMO, but the mere addition of FullDive VR makes it all so much more engaging and flashy.
10 Best Anime Like Sword Art Online
If Sword Art Online had you hooked, then Log Horizon, Overlord, and Accel World will keep the excitement rolling.
Really, SAO probably would’ve been the best thing ever if its creator hadn’t gone completely bonkers and trapped the entire initial playerbase inside forno discernible reason.
Kind of miraculous anyone was ever willing to play VR games again after this incident, but nothing helps get consumer protections on the books like mass murder, I guess.
4The Amazing Digital Circus
The Amazing Digital Circus
Did you ever have one of those little activity center games on your computer when you were a kid? You know, they were kind of cheap, often had a kind of surreal, cartoony aesthetic to them? Have you ever wanted to live in one of those?
No? Well, too bad. Welcome to the Amazing Digital Circus, sucker.
The Amazing Digital Circus is the central setting of its namesake series, a children’s computer game with an apparent VR element. Much like those real-life kids' games, the central conceit of it seems to be an activity center, one where players get to go on a variety of colorful and wacky adventures that may or may not have educational merit.
We don’t know the full extent of The Amazing Digital Circus’ history at the time of writing, such as why it’s a VR game and why it seems to forcefully draw people into its world.
All we can say for certain is that it has a hard E-for-Everyone rating, which means no cursing allowed. Psychological scarring is fine, butcursing is a no-no.
3Chinpokomon
South Park
TheSouth Parkepisode “Chinpokomon” is a pretty transparent dig at the Poke-Mania phenomenon of the late 90s. If you’re old enough to remember, you know exactly how much we wanted to catch ‘em all.
In reality, Pokémon started as a video game before spinning off into anime, card games, and other assorted merchandising, but in South Park, it was the other way around.
In South Park, Chinpokomon starts as an animated series, branches out into collectible dolls, and then finally reaches video game status. Apparently, you can only play the Chinpokomon game on the special Chinpokomon game console with special Chinpokomon game controllers.
The game in question doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the Chinpokomon critters themselves; rather, it’s a simulation of military planes bombing Pearl Harbor.
This is because the entire Chinpokomon franchise was an elaborate scheme to brainwash children into, well, bombing Pearl Harbor.
2Riddle Of The Minotaur
Batman: The Animated Series
In the originalBatmancomics, Edward Nygma only took up the mantle of the Riddler because he was bored with scamming people at carnival games, and decided it’d be more fun to challenge the Caped Crusader.
In Batman: The Animated Series, though, Nygma’s origin has a little more meat, centered around a video game of his own design titled Riddle of the Minotaur.
In Riddle of the Minotaur, you play a Greek soldier making his way to the center of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Throughout the maze, you have to answer various trivia questions to open the way forward. Answer wrong, and the Hand of Fate scoops you up and dumps you in a random section of the maze.
Nygma was the brains behind this game and its subsequent success, though a contract kerfuffle resulted in him being fired from the publishing company. Thus, he became the Riddler to exact vengeance on his former boss. Matching wits with Batman was just a happy bonus.
1Global Thermonuclear War
In the early 1980s, computer games looked nothing like they do today, but that just meant you had to use your imagination a little more.
For example, in the movie WarGames, our protagonist David goes hacking through what he assumes is a computer game company and finds a litany of different games. These include classics like chess and backgammon, as well as more elaborate titles like Global Thermonuclear War.
David boots up the game and plays as the Soviet Union in a simulated nuclear conflict against the United States, with the interface being little more than a map of the world and lines representing missile trajectories. Despite its simplicity, it is accurate to real-life missile bases and military tactics.
What David doesn’t know is that this “game” isn’t intended for public consumption. It’s a simulator to train thewartime AI WOPR, which accidentally patches into the NORAD systems and nearly triggers an actual global thermonuclear war.
Luckily, the simulator didn’t include a stalemate state, so by adding one in the film’s climax, David is able to teach WOPR about the vital concept of mutually assured destruction.
9 Best Movie Tie-in Video Games
For every twenty terrible movie tie-in games, there is at least one that manages to be a pretty good time.
