The Top 10 Best Movie Depictions of Video Games

02. Wreck It Ralph

http://youtu.be/uxeR95aYer0

The thing about Wreck It Ralph is not so much that they got the video game right in a movie - but that they managed to use video games as the entire plot and focus while building on the subject in a way that makes it very easy to accept that if there was such an alternate world, and if the characters that are the very essence of the games we play actually lived in it, they would be just like this!

The first thing that they did really right was to dip into the 8-bit and arcade worlds for the characters who sat at the very heart of what video gaming once was.

When a now out of work Q*bert showed up panhandling with a sign that declares that his game was unplugged that hit old school gamers right in the gut. Because they remember him fondly. He was one of the characters that we willingly spent coin after coin to keep playing with.

A big part of the impact that some of those classic characters have is not so much the nostalgia - though there is that - but the role that they played in the lives of the gamers at the time. You have to understand that as mainstream gaming was first establishing its roots it was actually a controversial subject!

Parents in the early 1980s worried that the increasing fascination with the arcade social life was actually harming their kids. It wasn't so much that arcades were new - they were not, not at all.

The same parents who were worried had spent their own time in the arcades of their youth, but those arcades were filled with electro-mechanical pinball and theme-based games (think baseball, bowling, that sort of thing).

They were games that while fun, did not offer the sort of deep and involved story-worlds that can only be found courtesy of the integrated circuit and computer memory.

We know now that their worry, while understandable, was unfounded. We also know that the games - and their characters - were destined to take on the pop-culture roles that were traditionally occupied by characters from films and books in the distant past.

What Wreck It Ralph does is give the characters from our video games a voice of their own - and some unique character in their own right. And that's pretty special.