Ryan Reynolds’ new movie, Free Guy, takes place inside an MMO, but it’s certainly not the first movie to feature a fictional video game. Let’s look back at some other electronic entertainment made up for Hollywood.
This week sees the release of Free Guy, the new Ryan Reynolds movie where he plays an NPC in a massively multiplayer online game, Free City, that is headed for a shutdown. There’s no actual Free City game out there (yet), but it got us thinking about other fictional video games from the movies. Let’s fire up the old Universal Emulator to play the best video games in movies. Global Thermonuclear War From 1983’s War Games was the first truly significant video game film, starring Matthew Broderick as teen hacker David Lightman, who kills time by war dialing into random servers. When he accidentally penetrates NORAD, he scans their directory for games and starts up Global Thermonuclear War. David takes it for a high-tech simulation of anti-Commie missile warfare, but little does he know that it’s cued a supercomputer to raise the threat level in real life. Now our man must outwit the machine to stop it from launching nukes and destroying all life on Earth. (Stream War Games on Pluto TV.) Black Hole From If you haven’t seen Gilles Marchand’s 2010 drama Black Heaven, you should check it out. It tells the tale of Gaspard, a young French man who becomes ensorcelled by a beautiful blonde woman and follows her into Black Hole, a massively multiplayer online game with some disturbing parallels to the real world. A significant chunk of this movie’s screen time is spent in the digital world, and there are some really interesting design decisions and atmospheric effects that make it look extremely cool. ( Rent or buy Black Heaven.) Ninja Revolution From Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is obviously steeped in video game culture in every aspect, as our protagonist gets coins from downed foes and even employs a 1-Up to come back from death. But there’s only one real fictional game on display, and that’s arcade action title Ninja Revolution. Obviously based on DDR, the game combines fancy footwork with striking poses to defeat attacking ninja warriors. It looks like a huge amount of fun and makes me wonder why nobody ever made a combat-centered rhythm action game for real.
