Video games, like most forms of media, offer a shared experience that swathes of fans can collectively identify with and bond over, leading to many moments across games that become immortalized within the zeitgeist of video game culture. With the advent of memes via social media and the usual inspiration they take from external media, it is no surprise that the medium of video games has contributed quite significantly to some of the most recognizable and widespread memes to ever be formulated.
Many memes have become so ingrained in online discourse that their original origins and purposes have become blurred, with many memes that fall into this category originally stemming from video games. With the sheer range of content that video games cover combined with the huge outreach and translatability that they possess, there are several memes related to video games that have become iconic.
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Ah Sh*t, Here We Go Again - GTA: San Andreas
The iconicGrand Theft Auto: San Andreasis one of the most memorable installments to the massively successful franchise, and is often cited by many as their first foray into the series. With this in mind, it seems quite fitting that one of the most high-profile video game memes came from one of the first lines of dialogue in the title.
The line itself is spoken bySan Andreas’protagonist CJ, who is voicing his frustrations regarding returning to San Andreas and facing the familiar hardships that he had moved away to escape from. Perhaps largely down to how recognizable the line is due to its early appearance during the game, many fans clearly resonated with the sentiment behind “ah sh*t, here we go again,” applying it to a litany of real-world situations and developments. The explosion of this meme’s popularity came in 2019, a full 15 years after the launch ofSan Andreas, giving credence to the unpredictability of meme culture.
Press F To Pay Respects - Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfarewasreleased in 2014 and, while not being the most memorable or successfulCoDtitle, it is surprisingly home to one of the most widely-used and popular video game memes of all time. Towards the beginning of the title’s campaign, the player character attends a funeral of a friend and is prompted to pay respects to the deceased by pressing the F key on PC versions of the game.
Out of context, the notion of paying respects to the dead by pressing a key prompt is quite humorous in and of itself, and it perhaps fostered an increased notoriety around this particular scene that led to its explosion in popularity. Almost immediately following the game’s release, players shared screenshots of the casket and button prompt in comparable situations, usually ironically over small-scale hardships or gaming-related defeats. However, the consistentuse of the “Press F” memehas seen it transcend its original mocking form, with a simple message of the letter “F” being forever associated with a genuine mark of respect, taking on an entirely new meaning beyond the meme itself.
An Arrow In the Knee - The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrimis a widely regarded title, with a deeply committed and longstanding fan base that persists heavily to this day despite the title originally being released in 2011. This popularity was of course present upon the game’s massively anticipated release, with fans of the title bonding over the shared experience of exploring the exciting newprovince ofSkyrimand interacting with its inhabitants.
Perhaps the single-most dominant meme to come fromSkyrimcan be attributed to a throwaway stock line that was often repeated by town guards throughout the game, in which they would tell the player character “I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee.” The repeated use of this line led to it being embedded within the shared gameplay experience ofSkyrim, leading to it being repeated en masse in message boards and wider discussion.Skyrim’s “arrow in the knee” memeis largely considered to be one of the first globally viral and most memorable video game memes, with it dominating the wider discourse of the industry during the time ofSkyrim’srelease.
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Leeroy Jenkins - World of Warcraft
WithWorld of Warcraft being a large-scale MMO, and of the first titles of its kind, it is no wonder that it is also home to some of the most viral and widely-shared memes in the video game industry. Most likely, the most iconic meme fromWorld of Warcraftrelates to a video from 2005 that begins by showing a raid party discussing their tactics and strategy in detail before engaging the enemy in combat.
Mid-way through the thorough planning, an overly eager party member charges into the enemy and exclaims his name, Leeroy Jenkins, as a loud and sustained battle cry as he does so. With the entire party quickly being slaughtered thanks to the overzealous nature of Leeroy, the hilarious video was extensively shared across the internet, with “Leeroy Jenkins” being used as a battle cry of blind confidence to this day. The video was so well received thatBlizzard reference the Leeroy Jenkins memeextensively with in-game content and beyond, with shows like Family Guy even recently making direct references to this iconic meme.
Baka Mitai - Yakuza / Like a Dragon
A more recent iconic meme to come from video games comes from theYakuzafranchise, which is now stylized asLike a Dragon. While there’s a lot toexpect from theLike a Dragonfranchise in 2023, the meme in question relates to the karaoke mini-game that can be found in severalYakuzatitles, with the meme itself gaining popularity after the 2015 release ofYakuza 0.
In the game, players can helpYakuzaprotagonist Kazuma Kiryusing along to a sad ballad called Baka Mitai, or “So Foolish” in English. The chorus of the song plays a melancholic cinematic in which Kiryu sits at a bar while passionately singing, with this part of the song, in particular, spawning a widespread and iconic meme. While the song itself became popular, the cinematic in question was used as one of the first-ever “first-order motion” deepfakes, or face morphs. With fans being able to take the motion capture rigging for the cinematic and apply it to a litany of other images to make completely unrelated characters sing the song, the translatability and range of use that Baka Mitai possessed saw it become a recent but iconic video game meme.
Do a Barrel Roll - Star Fox 64
TheNintendo 64 titleStar Fox 64is home to one of the oldest memes in gaming, originally released in 1997. The origin of the meme is simple enough, with the player character being instructed to “do a barrel roll” maneuver by the franchise character Peppy Hare. The line itself is delivered with a certain comedic cadence that made it become synonymous with the title, with the love and memorability of the command persisting long after the game’s release and into some of the earliest message boards and video-sharing websites on the internet.
Being a staple of some of the earliest memes in existence, “do a barrel roll” was applied to anything that even remotely indicated an aerial spin for quite some time on the internet, and is widely considered to be one of themost iconic video game memesto ever exist. The spread of the meme is so engrained in internet culture that typing “do a barrel roll” into Google will play a special animation, giving credence to just how popular it is.
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The Cake Is a Lie - Portal
The 2007 puzzle platformer is renowned for its unique and thought-provoking gameplay.Portalis one of the best platformersof all time, according to fans, and some of the more implicit lore and narrative surrounding the game have given way to an extremely popular and iconic gaming meme. Throughout the title, the player character is forced to endure a series of tumultuous test chambers and experiments, with the game’s antagonist GLaDOS continuously promising the reward of cake upon completion.
As the lethal and sinister nature of the Aperture Science research facility in which the game is set becomes apparent, the player is given access to hidden rooms and compartments befit with ominous scrawled messages on the walls, offering missable but key narrative insight to the title. One of the most famous messages found in these rooms is “the cake is a lie,” which appears extensively throughout the game.
The simultaneously comedic but foreboding nature of this message led to its mass adoption by the game’s fan base online, with"the cake is a lie" becoming a widespread meme. Transcending beyond its original usage, the phrase soon developed into a genuine idiom, often being used to indicate when a promised end goal for something is unattainable or misleading. It can be said that the communities that form around video games are one of the best aspects of the entertainment medium, and so it is no wonder that so many iconic memes have spawned from them.
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