BIT.TRIP Shovel Meat Boy Knight

(Or autophagic pop culture shenanigans as applied to indie games)

Finishing Dig Dog’s review and thinking about revisiting BIT.TRIP RUNNER before putting down some words on it made me realize the medium has been living its best “I understood that reference” life for around a decade now.

By the early 2010’s Super Meat Boy (openly SMBed from “Super Mario Bros.”) was the pronged tip of the tarantinian spear in videogames, and there’s been countless “princesses in another castle” around after that. Maybe the BIT.TRIP series was only stating the bursting indie scene was around to stay with the frequent cameos of other similar projects–SMB (Super Meat Boy) included–but either way it never quite went away, from the ubiquitous Shovel Knight’s presence to, say, “Dig Dog”; or, even better, “Duck Souls''--a game (a good one, too), you guessed, hard as Dark Souls but with a duck for protagonist.

Of course, the trope has always been around to be abused by any art-to-entertainment project in need of a little milking. Pop culture referencing was the (unrelated) meat of many–good and bad–parody movies in the 90’s, and it’s been alive and well ever since (especially at the perpetually flourishing “kids-to-adults” animation corner–or superheroes action/adventure movies all the same). To shorten the argument, my bet is Don Quixote’s windmills have been cited for the last 400 years without anyone ever reading a line of the damn thing–or at least that’s what can be inferred from people’s opinions on it.

What changed then? Well, for one, people wanting to pass for “cultured” in other mediums would sooner than later be busted and/or ridiculed–one couldn’t fake it forever being constantly exposed to public chances of dropping the ball; two, the innocuous white lie–or even the honest tribute/homage, when it was the case–was yet to be coopted by money-printing machines as a mechanism to hit the right dopamine buttons in their audiences, who, at this point, actually believe they’re cultured.

What to conclude from all this? Well, perhaps videogames are more susceptible to the phenomena being young enough to be maturing at this point in entertainment history; perhaps carefully put together interactive museums like Sakurai’s Smash Bros. can be useful to help preserving the medium’s fragile memory; and perhaps Fortnite can make Marvel levels of money out of it… but I’m not sure it does authorial indies any good any more.