Funny Moments in Videogames

To be honest, I'd be hard pressed to pick a particular moment of humour from any one game. I've been playing videogames for, ooh, must be 30 years by now, and a lot of them have crossed my path. The total must be into several thousand by now, and that's not even including online or downloadable games.

I think for me, the humour in a game is at its best when it subverts the story it's telling a little, either by poking fun at itself, or by breaking (or at least nudging) the fourth wall a little, and reminding you that what the character is doing would be fairly ridiculous in real life.

I think the best way to go with this will be to just pick a few examples.

The Secret of Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge (Lucasarts) - There's way too many moments in this game. After all, it's a comedy point and click adventure, being funny is what it's supposed to do. But still...

The whole story of the game is supposedly being narrated by the lead character, as if he were telling what had been happening to him in the last few months. At one point, he's suspended above a pit of acid, with about ten minutes to devise a MacGyverish way of escaping. If you actually wait out the ten minutes, he falls into the pit of acid and dies. We then cut to darkness, and then the person he's telling the story to says something along the lines 'So, how exactly are you telling me this?'

'Oh, er...'

Game resets to you being suspended above the acid.

Another example would be Nethack (Various systems): This is a game which has accreted over the years, and included little sly references to all kinds of books, films and other media of the fantasy genre. At one point, people used to say the game included everything but the kitchen sink; a few versions later, it included kitchen sinks.

It's the rarer, hard to get messages which are funniest, though. If a character throws something heavy or sharp in the air, and they're not wearing a helmet, and it kills them, their tombstone will read 'Killed by elementary physics'.

One of the odder parts of the game is being able to transform into different creatures in the right circumstances; this is where messages get really weird. If you turn into something metallivorous (able to eat metal), and eat a trident, you get the message 'That was pure chewing satisfaction!'. For the non US readers, Trident is a brand of chewing gum.

They even have messages you can't see in the current version, but are visible in the source code. If you could change into something that can eat rock (and nothing can at present), and ate a flint stone, you'd get the message 'That was Yabba Dabba Delicious!'

There are a lot of amusing games that have been produced over the years, but to me, anything that's that little bit seditious towards player expectations has the edge.