Game-inna-game

[Lee__Kanker]

The best famicom rpg, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei 2, begins with you playing a dragon quest-esque rpg on your computer; where it's a recreation of the the first game. You even get a fake game over screen, with your friend mocking you if you die!

This has got to be the oldest game where Ive seen the game-inna-game thing

But 1990 isnt THAT old, what about the 80s? Has anyone seen an older game do that?

Minigames dont count, its gotta be A Videogame! Even if it has simple gameplay like a minigame, it has to be Your Character playing a videogame in its own world.

Let's say board games count too, while playing my beloved Siren and feeling anxiety like a darth vader was force-strangling my lungs; the last thing I expected was randomly finding a board game on the ground and being able to play it in the main menu. But it happened!

 

[DieselBrand]

I only know this site here with a lot of 80s games https://www.top80sgames.com/site/

 

[Tonberry]

Not 80s (or, well, the game does take place in the 80s), but still.

 

[JPchicre]

I think the one of the most famous examples were the NES roms in the GameCube Animal Crossing. As a kid i loved the concept, it felt like getting double the game (or more) for the price of one. One bad example (IMO) is in Kingdom Hearts 3, there were cool Arcade like games, mimicking the Game & Watch, in the game. But they were way too simplistic for anyone to bother booting KH3 just to play them.

Post automatically merged: Today at 11:31 AM

The GTA San Andreas Arcade minigames did the concept better, i think

 

[bjork]

Lazy Jones did it on the Commodore 64 in 1984

Fantasy Zone was in Arnold Palmer Golf on Genesis in 1989 [edit - but Arnold Palmer himself doesn't fly around so I guess it doesn't count here]

 

[UnDubious]

Keep in mind space was very limited in the '80s, so it wouldn't be very surprising if Megami Tensei 2 was actually first to let you play another game within a game, as it would have been a waste of precious ROM space to do this kind of "cool but unnecessary" things earlier. -- Didn't know about Lazy Jones, interesting. It's basically a mini-game collection where the main game is a framing device, so not exactly the same thing, but it does have the meta aspect covered. Cool stuff.

 

[qw90700]

I actually like games in games idea perhaps more than I should. PS2-era games were "wow" on that like in GTA San Andreas you have a video game console at home to play and arcade machines around places too, and in Second Sight which is a serious "me have superpowers" action game you can use computers around like in Deus Ex and whatnot but thus you could play minigames on these computers.

In another PS2 game called Metal Saga that is a Metal Max game with a different name, you have a portable PC that you can find games to play on it by hacking arcade machines to download them to your PC.

On a SNES game called The Legend of Mystical Ninja you can go play arcade game Gradius.

On a NES game called Blades of Steel which is a plain hockey game had "Gradius moment" lol but it doesn't meet your criterion:

I guess this is as far as I know from very old games.

 

[MrChester]

I couldn't find anything as legit as Lazy Jones before 1984 (great find btw, bjork), but I do offer a technicality from 1982:

The characters are canonically playing a videogame - they're just also inside said videogame. The game is them being in a game but there isn't a game outside of them being in a game, you dig?

Honestly though, I'm thinking there's probably a text adventure game from around 1980 that meets the criteria better but heck if I'm gonna find it