http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PacManFever

For the 1982 novelty single and album by Buckner & Garcia, click here.

For whatever reason, video games seen on TV never evolved past a very primitive state. Classic 8-bit games (such as Pac-Man), 2D pixel graphics, and synthetic sounds and music are cutting-edge technology.

In live-action, standard practice is to render bleeping Arcade Sounds, and bounce a shifting light pattern off the characters playing (read: Button Mashing furiously). In animation, actual game graphics can be rendered, but they are seldom very sophisticated. If the video game's graphics are depicted in-show and are 2D, the sprites will often feature irregularly-shaped/"angled" pixels that actual sprite-based hardware couldn't handle until the mid-SNES era at best. Game music is almost never heard, and if it is, it's almost always an 8-bit chiptune.

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Characters talking about video games will similarly seem out-of-touch. They will refer to the game in numbered levels and the main goal will be Scoring Points, which are elements tied more to arcades than home consoles. If a story line is mentioned, it will only be as deep as "save the galaxy from aliens". It seems that the only way to play these games is to hit all the buttons as fast as possible and to move the control stick(s) wildly without direction, especially when playing with someone else.

In short, this is The Theme Park Version of video games.

This trope has many root causes. Most important of all is that high-quality game graphics/sounds/music competes for screen time and the viewer's attention ï¿½ similar to the cause of Stylistic Suck. Plus, the music in particular may ruin the overall tone if they were to actually use the in-game soundtrack. The second reason would be money. While it wouldn't be hard to toss in some footage and sound from a modern game, it may cost quite a bit to get the rights to do so, and it would definitely cost quite a bit to make something original. Thirdly, primitive game graphics can be a visual shorthand for "not real" in cartoons, which are already moving, simplified graphics. Last of all, since Most Writers Are Adults, they may not be avid gamers, either knowing only the 8-bit glory of their youth or having come of age before video games. This actually resulted in a strange Coconut Effect for a long time in both film and television depictions of gaming, only in recent years has this trope been starting to be averted.

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If you're too young to remember what Pac-Man was like on the 2600, check this out. And this for good measure. And, this is Donkey Kong on the same system. These two games probably account for the vast, vast majority of Arcade Sounds used on TV. Very rarely, though, you'll hear a Super Mario Bros. sound effect, or one from Sonic the Hedgehog every once in a blue moon.

While obviously unrealistic for most settings to the point of seeming Totally Radical, from a storytelling perspective the audio and graphics will instantly tell any audience member of any age that the characters are playing a video game, as opposed to watching a movie where a more realistic approach is usednote This is helped somewhat by re-releases and indie games keeping this style of game from disappearing altogether. This may be a Discredited Trope before long, being replaced by Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 thanks to Moral Guardians. High profile Product Placement may cause this as well, if the video game industry outperforms other media.

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Note that we're assuming that the characters haven't purchased any games online or modified their consoles to play old games, unless otherwise stated.

See also: Arcade Sounds, Beeping Computers, Fictional Video Game, Video Arcade, The Coconut Effect, Public Medium Ignorance, Two Decades Behind, and Hollywood Game Design. Compare Stock Footage. If pushed far enough, it can lead to Schizo Tech. Not to be confused with the Nintendo GameCube game of the same name or an obsession about a certain Filipino boxer. For the case of someone playing Pac-Man feverently, see Just One More Level.

The Trope Namer is the 1982 novelty song "Pac Man Fever" by Buckner and Garcia.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Asian Animation

In Happy Heroes, any time a video game the characters are playing is being shown on-screen, it utilizes previously-used 8-bit art shift footage and couples it with similarly retro-sounding music to fit. This show mostly takes place on a futuristic planet and one of the characters, Doctor H., invents a virtual reality headset in one of the early episodes.

Comic Books

Fan Works

Amazingly, Calvin and Hobbes: The Series manages to play this trope straight. Andy plays a portable game by button-mashing, and the game is described as "a plumber trying to rescue a princess from a wizard and collect the power crystals", something found in mid-80's to early-90's video games. Said chapter couldn't have been released later than 2010.

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Radio

SiriusXM's "Decades" stations are each devoted to music from a specific decade, and the station identification bumpers are all designed to evoke a bit of popular culture from some point in that decade, be it a song, a movie, a TV show, or something else. One of these uses an 8-bit rendition of Koronbeiniki, which actually works fairly well as in between the various platforms (PC, Mac, NES/Famicom, Game Boy) and the staggered release schedule for different parts of the world (thanks, Cold War), nearly half of the years in The '80s saw at least one major Tetris release...or at least, it would if they weren't using it on The '90s station.

Video Games

Web Animation

Web Comics

Narbonic, oddly, has Atari-style joystick ◊ Quake.

Quake. Sluggy Freelance : Parodied in this strip . Kada refers to the game as "Super Graphical 3D Battle Area In 3D(tm)" and the game options offer everything from "battle smells" to "monkeys", but what we actually see on the holographic screen looks like crude black-and-white 8-bit graphics—specifically, arcade classic Berzerk. Sluggy normally averts this. Older strips made reference to real games and systems. Later on, he switched to using obvious Bland Name Products of current systems (The Playstashun and the SuWii). The game that comes up the most often is Fashion Rancher and various spinoffs, most likely a reference to the Monster Rancher series, and possibly a Take That! at the Dead or Alive volleyball games.



Web Videos

Western Animation

Real Life

Hard to pull off a real life example, but: Penny Arcade's stock promotional shot of the two creators deliberately invokes this trope, showing Krahulik and Holkins flailing around on a couch, pretending to play a game. Holkins is holding a PSP as if it's a controller and Krahulik is holding an Xbox 360 controller upside down.

This news announcement about Grand Theft Auto IV, on RAI (the Italian national broadcasting company), featuring a guy furiously mashing random buttons DURING THE TRAILER. Obviously, they're talking about the game in "Seduction of the innocents"-like terms, because GTA4 doesn't have RE4-style interactive cut scenes.

news announcement about Grand Theft Auto IV, on RAI (the Italian national broadcasting company), featuring a guy furiously mashing random buttons DURING THE TRAILER. Obviously, they're talking about the game in "Seduction of the innocents"-like terms, because GTA4 doesn't have RE4-style interactive cut scenes. Being into retro gaming can make this trope Truth in Television. Playing older games has only become more popular with time, thus it's not uncommon for people to play twenty- or thirty-year-old games often. There are also a lot of Retraux-style games being made that invoke this.

Aversions

Advertising

A Dr. Mario ad shows a game played with a two-player link cable, and some intense button-mashing, possible on a harder difficulty.

There's a battery commercial that features a kid playing what looks to be a (fictional) Game Boy Advance fighting game against his grandpa, and defeating him over and over — until his batteries start dying on him, allowing his grandpa to turn the tables. The notably true-to-life moment comes when we see the grandpa's character continuing to land sorta-registered blows even as his opponent falls, which seems to indicate that someone on the team, at least, was doing their homework.

An ad for The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants shows Bart playing the game, excitedly tossing around while moving around the gamepad. This may be possible. The gamepad, however, is closer to a Sega gamepad. Though the ad is for the NES version, the game is available on the Sega Genesis.

In a painful to watch ad for The Legend Of Zelda I, one player is alternating left and right on the D-pad while hitting A and B quickly. This is not unreasonable for the game.

Anime and Manga

Comics

MAD's "The Lighter Side Of" often features kids who are playing video games on consoles that vaguely resemble actual ones. However, one strip shows a girl eagerly grasping the controller while the disk door is open.

Inverted in Ultimate Nightmare: Bobby is shown playing what looks like a current gen game on a regular old Game Boy.

An issue of Teen Titans Go! clearly has Robin and Raven playing a Nintendo 64 game. While not the newest of consoles it was just a few years old at the time

Films — Animation

Played with in the beginning of Toy Story 2. While the graphics are every bit as advanced as the movie's animation (and intentionally so,) note so much so that some Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games look slightly worse or merely as good a decade later, Super Nintendo (albeit with the Super Famicom/PAL controller), which was more-or-less current when writing began.

Super Nintendo (albeit with the Super Famicom/PAL controller), which was more-or-less current when writing began. Disney's Wreck-It Ralph plays with this, given the setting. The main character is from a faux Donkey Kong-era game, and a lot of the sound effects are classic arcade bleep bloops, but the crux of the plot involves visiting a variety of different Video Game worlds, at least one of which is basically Halo as a light-gun rail shooter. Ralph is even horrifically amazed at how much games have evolved since his own day, and of course it's played for laughs. The word "retro" is even mentioned, and is stated as "Old, but cool." The biggest difference between the movie's universe and the real world — aside from video game characters being secretly alive a la Toy Story — is that apparently arcades have never been displaced by home computers and consoles as the primary venue for gaming; hence, hot new titles continue to be released as increasingly high-tech cabinets. Arcade-only games even have their own TV commercials, which end with a plug for the nearest arcade that carries them.

Films — Live-Action

Literature

In Stormbreaker, Alex gets a modified Game Boy Color (a Nintendo DS in the film version) and cartridges that not only have the games themselves but also provide the modified GB Color with useful functions. Two of these games, Nemesis and Bomber Boy (aka Atomic Punk in the United States), are actual Game Boy titles. Sadly though, Alex never uses the game parts of the cartridges. In Skeleton Key, he gets a Game Boy Advance with a Rayman game that doubles as a Geiger counter.

Christopher Brookmyre regularly averts this trope, and several of his books not only mention various real life games, but also clan gaming, DS homebrew, and mods. Of course, his books will also contain nods to a number of games, as well as more general consideration of video gaming tropes.

In the second Darkest Powers book (which was released in 2009), Rae is depicted playing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on a Nintendo Gamecube while at the facility. She complains that it is outdated and says the workers have told her they'll bring a Wii for her soon.

Live-Action TV

Music

Ironically, the Trope Namer Pac Man Fever is an aversion, given the fact that 1) the sounds in question are from the video games in question, 2) they were, in fact, new at the time of the album's release and 3) the lyrics clearly show that at least one of the band members has intimate knowledge of them.

Newspaper Comics

Web Comics

Digital Unrest has had a couple of cracks at this trope: Here and here.

and here. MegaTokyo makes lots of references to gaming technology that does not (yet?) exist in the real world, such as the PlayStation 4, Mosh Mosh Revolution ("Tohya, what's a mosh?") and a Robot Girl accessory for Dating Sim games. Early in the strip's run (2001) characters are seen wearing PlayStation 3 paraphernalia, including a jacket with the line "Live in your world, Die in mine." parodying a Sony ad campaign of the time. Said character has been updated to feature a PlayStation 4 jacket. Sony developers in both cases were talking about developing said sequel consoles right as the current consoles were about to be released.

Lampshaded in this strip from The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!. Bob just isn't a very "state-of-the-art" kind of guy.

Web Original

Western Animation