In Nishi-Hagi-wawa, Suginami-ku, Tokyo, a group of people have been making "fake games" for 15 years, and every year during the Golden Week holiday in Japan from April to May, hundreds of designers and artists submit homemade red and white machine cassettes to an exhibition called "My Famicase Exhibition" that has never existed in history. Although these cards have beautiful covers and interesting gameplay descriptions, they are actually "non-operational", and the main purpose of the exhibition is to treat the cassettes as an artistic presentation through the form of fake games, which also makes old players nostalgic.
A piece at the My Famicase Exhibition 2020 that was very interesting
However, the designers involved in the My Famicase Exhibition are only making a fuss about the medium, and they don't know that making fake games has become a deeper, richer and more elaborate craft. Some fake games, in addition to not being able to play, the graphics and story are even decent, and some of them will not be less.
In February 2020, Apple TV+ released a sitcom called Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet, led by veteran film and television company Lionsgate Entertainment, with Ubisoft also participating in the production.
In fact, the news of the cooperation between the two was announced at E3 in 2019, as for why the game company was called to shoot the scene, it was because the story of the show revolved around a game studio that developed and operated a large MMORPG. The production team probably wants to emulate the "Silicon Valley" model, directly show the audience what happens behind the scenes of the company, and win ratings through people's curiosity.
Mythical Quest: Feast of Crows
Although this drama has many funny sections, it still explores some more realistic problems. The game's creative director, Gang Gang, launched the project known as "Mythical Mission" based on the vulgar theme of sword and magic; the programmer is a John Carmack-style genius who is usually muffled and can solve almost any technical problem; the elderly Nebula Award-winning writer is responsible for writing the background story for the game and has communication difficulties with young people; the marketing director changes his method to let players get kryptonite gold and get rid of a profit-and-forgetful image of a profit-seeking businessman.
The teams of these people with very different personalities are bound to have disputes, from cultural disputes over character design to speculation about using Internet celebrities to bring goods, and various conflicts have also triggered multiple dramatic effects. Impressively, the show also depicts the "spoilage" of an indie game, telling the story of how a deep and fun work is constantly compromising to the market due to its fame and capital injection.
However, since it is filming game-related content, the game itself is naturally something that cannot be skipped. In addition to using Assassin's Creed, Glory and Might and Magic, and even other studio works such as Heaven: Deliverance to fill the gaps in the scenes, in order to have something to say, Ubisoft's Red Storm team really needs to make a picture for the "fake game" of "Journey of Myths".
This cutscene in the play is obviously from "Heroes of Might and Magic VII"
In the view of Danielle Kreinik, the series' executive producer, Red Storm Studios, which has been involved in the development of the Rainbow Six, Far Cry and The Division series, is undoubtedly a guarantee of convincing. They built a sandbox system and created a European fantasy-style MMORPG environment. Characters in fake games such as The Masked Man and The White Knight also have original 3D modeling that at least allows the actors to perform in real objects. The game studio on the set is also the result of a lot of collaboration between Ubisoft and the show's art department. From the character drawings on the walls, to the display settings and toys on the table, even bug trackers, motion capture devices, and animation programs, it has to be like a real game development environment.
To be fair, the supporting resources presented by the fake game "Journey of Myths" should be enough to fool the audience outside the circle, but for those players who are well versed in the details of AAA works, its quality will be separated from the story in the series. After all, its sales do not seem to be better than the overwhelming page game patch advertisements in recent years, and it can actually become a popular work in the parallel world, and can only not be investigated.
The graphics of the fake game Journey of Myths are really average
The good news is that the questions the entire crew discussed around the game are fairly reliable. This was thanks to the fact that they hired a number of real game studio members and also took the time to discuss gameplay trends and technical hurdles, as well as industry issues involving political correctness and overtime culture. Only in this way can the crew, who originally did not know much about the game, let go of the previous misunderstandings and prejudices, and not make content that offended the player.
Unlike Mythical Quest: A Feast for Crows, which confronted the entire game industry from the start, "The Night Babby Died," the final episode of the fourth season of the TV series Room 104, focused on smaller emotions. It tells the story of two long-lost friends who re-examine the past and bond again through a game called Crowning Glory II. The spread of positive energy around video games can also be said to be a relatively rare theme in the field of traditional media.
In Room 104, a pair of lonely young people stare at the pixel screen on the TV, and the two join forces to explore the dungeon, solve puzzles, and defeat the enemy, and their expressions gradually change from confusion to happiness. But as you might have guessed, "Glory of Chigo 2" doesn't exist in reality.
Stills from Room 104
The "Chigo Glory 2" in the series has a retro and rather exquisite graphics, and the setting is an 8-bit game. According to screenwriter Jenée LaMarque, the combat part of the fake game references The Legend of Zelda and Crystalis, the first-person exploration of the dungeon comes from Dreamstar, boss battles are somewhat like "Super Confused Star Wars", and with cutscenes such as "Ninja Dragon Sword", the game's "formula" is formed - although it sounds particularly "stitched", but from another point of view, you can know that they are knowledgeable.
The battle graphics in Chigo Glory 2 do resemble the early Zelda Legends
It is worth mentioning that the story of the TV series also comes from the game experience of director Mark Duplass. Once he and his older brother played Wizardry and accidentally killed the character so that they didn't eat that night, and then their friend and co-writer Julian Wass did some features to untie Mark's heart and fill his long-standing regret:
"On New Year's Eve a few years ago, we were both at Mark's house and I told him what I found. In Witchcraft, they can actually recover a character's body and drag it to town for resurrection. I said, "Mark, if you can find your old cartridge... The characters who died should still be there." ”
Responsible for putting these fantasies to life is the special effects team Barnstorm VFX, who has designed large, dilapidated architectural landscapes for The Curious Man of the High Castle, and is more familiar with some small digital special effects, but the demand for "making a fake game" is unheard of.
The puzzle element of Shigo Glory 2
"Shigo Glory 2" has a fantasy-style skin, has some form of story, and has to have a cutscene animation in order to match the actor's performance. Barnstorm VFX first came up with the idea of asking a pixel artist to solve the static scene.
But the first thing to make is not good, the key problem is that today's pixel art has more pixel art than the games of the eight-bit machine era in terms of optional colors, and there is no worry about insufficient storage space, and artists do not have to be like programmers in the 80s, who can only occupy 16 pixel cells with three colors.
Later, Barnstorm VFX changed its thinking, that is, first draw the image by hand, and then, with the color palette limited, convert itself into a digital picture little by little, and at the same time, it is necessary to note that the pixels on the CRT TV will produce distortions, because they are not necessarily square.
The graphics of "Zhigao Glory 2" are still a little stronger than the eight-bit game
As for the display of the gameplay in the TV series, it is forged in the form of close animation, setting a walking cycle for the game characters. Chip music can be easily solved by chipsounds programs, just note that the audio output of FC provides the main theme for two square waves, a triangle wave to show low frequencies, a noise channel to simulate game sound, and a sample channel to achieve simple sampling.
Finally, considering that actors may not be able to react realistically to fake games in real time, the "Room 104" crew's approach is to paste sticky notes marked with numbers around the TV set, and then bring headphones to the actors, and let their eyes interact with the screen by "watching the X sticky note".
A special situation is that the fake games in cultural and entertainment works can sometimes get the opportunity to transform into real games, just as Mr. Lu Xun sighed in the article "Hometown": "In fact, there is no road on the ground, and the more people who walk, the more they become the road." ”
Space Paranoids, for example, was originally a fake game from the 1982 movie Tron. In a fictional storyline, software engineer Kevin Flynn's Code for Space Insane was stolen by a colleague and then released as a product of ENCOM. When Flynn angrily ran to the board to report the incident, what awaited him was the end of the sweep.
Crazy Space in the movie
Later, in order to collect evidence of crimes from colleagues, Flynn mistakenly entered the online world. Because fake games play a key role in the film' continuity and threading, in 2009, the real-life 42 Entertainment company showed a playable arcade version of it at the San Diego Comic Con.
The feel of "Real Space Madness" is the same as the movie, the gameplay is not much different from the common FPS, players need to use the joystick to control movement and shooting, trackball is used for aiming, points are obtained by destroying enemies such as tanks and turrets, and there are some ammunition supply stations in the map.
Space Crazy at San Diego Comic-Con
Interestingly, 42 Entertainment signed the developer ENCOM, and the highest score on the game's charts, 999,000, was maintained by the film's protagonist Kevin Flynn, and then they later made an Online version based on the Unity engine, which could be run with a plug-in in the browser - as a warm-up for the film sequel "Tron: Battle", which is also a remembrance of the classic works of more than 20 years ago.
In fact, for the 1984 movie "Cloak & Dagger", Atari did something similar. The protagonist in the plot of the movie is a child who especially likes to play games, and always fantasizes about having a super agent by his side. He inadvertently obtains a cassette tape, which reveals that it contains military secrets, which leads to the disaster of killing, but the adults think that he is completely nonsense.
Stills from the Little Devil May Cry movie
The film doesn't have a particularly detailed depiction of the fake game, and the Atari 5200 flashes by, and the cassette is still a prop (take the cassette of other games and paste it on the cover of Little Devil May Cry). When the producers actually approached Atari to talk about cooperation and asked to develop a game as an element of the movie, Atari turned around and renamed the arcade "Agent X" he was working on to "Little Ghost Soldier", especially Chicken Thief.
Atari's "Little Devil Soldier"
Obviously, in addition to the character modeling of the agent, this arcade game has little to do with the movie plot, and the gameplay is a common top-down shot, the agent constantly shoots bullets like arrows, and there will be no children at all. Later, Atari employee Dave Comstock wanted to port it to a home console, which was a further restoration of the fake game features in the movie, but in the end it did not work.
Of all the fake games, I think Demonik is probably the most special one because it's in a "state of overlay of true and false."
Demon Man was portrayed as an amateur work developed by game tester Alex when it appeared in the film Grandma's Boy, and the film also showed some of the "fake games" of the third-person action gameplay. In the real world, however, Terminal Reality is actually working on this fictional game at the same time, and the finished product is expected to be exclusive to Xbox 360, and the graphics in the movie are derived from Demo. Because this work claims to have Wu Yusen participating in the production, it also aired on E3 in 2005, which attracted some attention. Unfortunately, due to financial problems, the development work was indefinitely shelved not long after.
Demon Man
There are many fake games similar to the above, such as in the movie "Her", the protagonist sits in the living room and plays an AR game, using simple gestures to move the character. The 1983 sci-fi film WarGames portrayed the military simulator as a text-based strategy game that nearly sparked World War III by being hacked by unidentified children.
These fake games can't be discussed in one fell swoop, some of them are just set in the background, as a narrative tool that doesn't cause copyright issues. Some of them are fake, and the filmmakers may feel that no game in reality can convey the idea they want. But in any case, they all form part of a unique landscape. Maybe years from now, people won't remember the names of the films and tv productions, but will recall the weird fake games.
Resources:
tvtropes:Fictional Video Game
How Ubisoft Created the Fake Video Game at Center of Apple+ Comedy
How to Make a Good Fake Video Game