There are a lot of reasons to love a video game. Great gameplay? You know I love it. Amazing story? I’m there for it every time. Fantastic graphics? I’ll write home to mom! All of those things make me enjoy a video game. Whether it be music or an interesting world to explore, there are so many different ingredients that allow a game to truly shine. But none of them - not one thing on this planet - will make me love a video game more than having another video game in it.
To be clear, I’m not talking about a minigame. Lots of games have minigames. Lots of games consist entirely of minigames. I’m specifically talking about video games that areinsideanother video game. The most magnetic thing you may have. If you tell me there’s a game within your game? Hoo boy, I’ll probably buy it. I’m not joking. I love it so much.
The Best Games Are The Games Within Games
You know what first got me to play aLike A Dragongame many years ago? You probably do because you read the headline. That’s right, it was the fact that your character could run to an arcade and play actual arcade games. The first time I did that, it felt like anything was possible. Rather than having to leave my apartment to go to an arcade, I can leave afictionalapartment and go to afictionalarcade.
WhenLike A Dragon: Infinite Wealthcame out, I took the very first chance I had to go to the arcade and playVirtua Fighterdespite already owning many versions of Virtua Fighter. For some reason this is deeply appealing to me, a grown man. I want to waste my characters’ time while wasting my own!
And when I played the originalAnimal Crossingwith my friends in college, all of us desperately wanted to get theNESgames for our houses. It’s also, if you ask me, the saddest loss in the series. They were literally the coolest things to find in the entire game! I get thatNintendowants to sell older games over and over - or, at least, make them a bonus for a paid subscription - but god there was no feeling greater than putting playable video games inside your fake home.
Building an arcade inNew Horizonsjust doesn’t compare. You can’t play it! But twenty years ago, the presence of games somehow made our islands feel more real because this was how we’d probably relax on those islands in our actual lives.
Nor do they have to be previously existing video games! Arcade Paradise lets you build an entire arcadeand then play the games in it. None of them are real outside of Arcade Paradise and it’s all the better for it. A few entries in theGrand Theft Autoseries have their own little games too. They tend to be parodies of/based on real games, but they’re still there for the playing!
The Games Within Games Don’t Even Need To Be Good
When that update toCyberpunk 2077added its own fake/new games, I immediately jumped in. I don’t remember a thing about them, but I certainly rushed to play. I’m saying I don’t care if these games are fun or not or even memorable. I’d rather find all the games inFallout 4than the plot in Fallout 4.
Hell, I remember playing Namco Museum for the originalPlayStationand having my mind blown at the ability to walk between arcade machines. To be fair, now the 3D museum segment looks like an indie horror game made by one person in seclusion. But at the time, the idea ofmovingbetween arcade machines was incredible.
And that’s not really even a game within a game! It’s just that I loved the chance to pretend I was walking around and stopping at different game cabinets. And, yes, the same magic trick worked on me again in Pac-Man Museum Plus.
If all this sounds a little stupid, don’t worry. It is! In 2002, we definitely already had emulators that could handle NES games. In fact, it was probably easier to find ROMs for games back in the day when nobody was looking but that’s neither here nor there. But we wanted those NES games because they were a symbol of something within the game itself.
Not for nothing, playable means the item is actually usable, meaning it’s one of the fictional objects within the game fulfilling its real life purpose. Even when there really is no purpose to putting it in at all, like Zork in Call of Duty: Black Ops.Especiallywhen there really is no purpose to putting it in at all.
So if you want me to buy your video game, all you need to do is put another video game inside it. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. It doesn’t matter how it plays. I want to see an interactive product on a fake screen while playing an interactive product on a real screen. That way, at least I know that my character can avoid saving the city/country/world the same way I can avoid work.
