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Do you remember when in TV shows in the 2000s they had to film someone playing a game and sometimes they just invented fake games, with wonky looking game footage that didn't really look like real playable games? This is a thread about real games that look like those fake games.
Let's start with Skull Cracker, this game has definitely that quality of "this is not a real game" to me, I think it's the mix of very poorly drawn animated graphics and the high resolution\\color
SoulTrap is just too weird to be real, moving platforms, floating boxes, you have a gun and a full 3D body. This is clearly one of those fake game you see 5 seconds of footage of in a movie where producers barely knew what a videogame was
Montezuma's Return gives me similar vibes to SoulTrap, the fact that you have levels called "Temple" with giant bouncing skulls and the game looks like poorly done CG makes it a perfect entry
Galapagos is a truly bizarre one, it really looks like something out of The Lawnmower Man, it's pure late 90s cyberspace and it's even weirder to play
Assassin 2015 is a great entry, it has a terribly generic name like all those fake games often did and it uses a lot of prerendered graphics and FMV clips, it's basically what hollywood though games were after Doom, but it's an actual real game!
bonus round: do you remember that golf game from The Simpsons? This is a bit cheating as that was clearly inspired by real PC games of that time, but I think Microsoft Golf 2.0 surpass it, managing to look even more boring:
wow people are enjoying my weird obsession with obscure and crappy games more than I though, you can follow me for more retrogaming oddities <3
ok another one! Who remembers the movie Grandma's Boy? That movie show a lot of clips from a videogame called Demonik, some are clearly CG, others look legit and turns out they actually used a real game that was under development
For story reasons they made it look like a sort of 1 vs 1 fighting game and that doesn't seem to be the case, sadly the game never saw an actual release so it's cool that at least it got used in the movie
also back in 1996 I remember being kind of pissed off that this game was not real, it was the best part of that movie (watch both clips!)
wrapping up this thread with the best of them all, I present to you the Windows 95 Games Sampler Disc, it's not technically a game but it's interactive, and it showcases a lot of weird early windows games that could make this list too:
a great one I forgot that was mentioned in the comments, Virtual Hydlide. thanks to the heavy use of digitized footage this game looks more like if a tv troupe got the task of recreating an rpg for a tv show than a real game:
