10(ish) games for the 2010s pt 7

#4 Undertale

Finish these phrases for me:
The cake is ____.
All your base ______.
I used to be an adventurer like you, ______.

Yep, it’s time to talk about the sensation of the decade: memes, and how they relate to video games.  While memes and video games have always gone together, few games have captured the collective memetic attention of the internet as well as Undertale did.  Marketed as the RPG where no one has to die, Undertale gives the story of a kid who drops into an underground society and has to make their way out.  Full of a diverse cast of characters, excellent jokes, and some genuinely moving moments, Undertale is a game… I should probably actually finish.  Or play for longer than idk, 3 hours?  At least I’ve played this one a bit.

Of course, what Undertale represents here isn’t just the game, it’s the impact it has had on culture, both in gaming and outside it.  While other games may have captured the attention of mass culture through memes, Undertale did it to a degree few other games can even compete with.  Undertale cut to the core of its audience and time, using previous memes to its benefit to draw players in emotionally, likely with them being unaware it was happening.  With both jokes applicable to the time like doge and more overarching humor tropes, Undertale used the concept of memes to advance its own status as a hit game.

That’s not to say that Undertale did nothing original, far from it.  One only has to look at the hundreds of covers of Megalovania that exist on Youtube to see just how beloved the game is and how much people want to interact with it.  Undertale also marks a clear delineation of how videogaming culture went from a niche subgroup to just a part of culture at large.  Look, I don’t know what to tell you, but if a pro wrestler walks out to a video game song wearing a cosplay of the character who’s theme the song is, video gaming has gone mainstream.

	While Undertale used culture positively in getting people to experience it, many games have fallen victim to memes at their expense.  The infamous “Press F to pay respects” has entered the realm of legends due to its absurdity, and demonstrates how capricious cultural tides can be.  While some games that attempt to use popular memes to drive their popularity and fail, other spawn entire new memes around them becoming hits simply due to how quickly they spread across the internet.  We live in an age where in-jokes demonstrate one’s “superiority” with the creation of a popular meme being analogous to being a renaissance artist.  Where this is headed is anyone’s guess, but I don’t see videogame makers forgetting the lessons of Undertale anytime soon.