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Video games that mysteriously predict the future

MGS 2 got backlash for the majority of the time after its release by fans for some pretty petty reasons.

Hell, I would say it wasn't until 2012-2013 when I saw people admit it was good.


Yeah from a small vocal cult of man children pissy because they didn't get to play as Snake, it was still hugely recieved.
 
Yeah it was weird, it got amazing reviews at launch and within a year a lot of the same people who gave it high reviews were trashing it. There was a huge backlash.

idk calling it underrated doesn't really make sense either but it's one of the many ways MGS2 was such a wonderfully strange game. Nothing about it is simple, lol.
I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to MGS4 once ID tagging becomes legit.
 
Well i have to agree with this, in the beginning everyone hated Raiden and wanted to play as Snake, there was a huuuge fan backlash.... or the story was too complicated and just a bunch of nonsense, but over time people more and more appreciated the game and realized what a masterpiece MGS2 is.

You guys are both wrong. People liked the game right away. Yes, people were disappointed about raiden, but people still liked the game overall.
 
Whaaat? MGS2 was very well received.

It was well received critically, sure.

But initially droves of people complained for multiple reasons.

On gaming forums and YT, people would infamously talk shit about MGS 2 for the "bad" story, overboard on silliness, and the most notable and ironic of all : "why am I not playing as Snake?! Kojima lied to us!!"

It was often stated, and I believe there is even a thread here on Neogaf that I remember from my lurking days where lots of people chimed in as not enjoying the game.

Well i have to agree with this, in the beginning everyone hated Raiden and wanted to play as Snake, there was a huuuge fan backlash.... or the story was too complicated and just a bunch of nonsense, but over time people more and more appreciated the game and realized what a masterpiece MGS2 is.
Sn4ke got my back!
 
The Longest Journey predicted Twitter in 1999.

This was the first thing that came to mind.

And MGS2.

I'm not sure I get this. It probably speaks about Kojima's relationship with Konami, but which games are those pics taken from? Ground Zeroes? The one above looks like Solid Snake from MGS1, but with way better graphics (maybe Twin Snakes?)

They're from Ground Zeroes, there's a side mission where you play as MGS1 Solid Snake.
 
Whaaat? MGS2 was very well received.
No.
I remember mags back then writing that mgs 2 has a weird way of telling the story. Its too much as well not much gaming. I think until uncharted2 or hesvy rain, when cinematic gaming became popular when mgs2 took off.


Perfect dark as my contribution. The game predicted that there will be a black president in the future. I think the time in the game is set in the year 2010.
 
Didn't FFVIII strangely predict the fall of SD Radio Tower based TV and rise of Cable-based HD transmissions, even saying that most video transmissions were now watched online?
 
Ghost Recon Shadow Wars predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine, separatists groups included
Wow, another one for Ghost Recon. I have to get back to this game actually. Bought it with my launch 3DS and stopped playing about half way through.

And it was related to the South Ossetian rebels who were the enemies in the first two missions... I feel like the events in the last 15 years have been increasingly becoming Tom Clancy like...
Whaaaaaaat. I never heard that little detail.
 
With Perfect Dark 64, Rare predicted that U.S would have an African-American president in 2023.

906058-20090228_002307.jpg


It happened a little earlier than that but still. Game was released in 2000.

Everything predicted the US would have an African-American president back then.
 
They're from Ground Zeroes, there's a side mission where you play as MGS1 Solid Snake.
Thanks. I really need to finish Portable Ops and get on with the next games in the series, I'm ashamed to admit I only played the first three (Solid series I mean, because I also didn't play the MSX ones).
 
No.
I remember mags back then writing that mgs 2 has a weird way of telling the story. Its too much as well not much gaming. I think until uncharted2 or hesvy rain, when cinematic gaming became popular when mgs2 took off.


.

The game wasn't well recieved? What are you people talking about?Go back and look at some old reviews on metacritic. Go and look at some user reviews on gamefaqs when the game was launched. The game was well received
 
kojima's ideas all come from other sources, he is not some visionary. It's a conglomeration of cool stuff he read. Everything is basically a reference. It's cool and entertaining but hardly a single original thought in there. Just like 99% of all media.

But did he not expose it to a large audience who wouldn't possibly have seen/read/heard of it otherwise?
 
As has been mentioned, Deus Ex 1 is the best example of completely accidentally predicting the future.

Twin towers weren't present in the New York skyline because of engine limitations with respect to textures. So they add in info in the game about how it was destroyed in the early 21st century by a terrorist attack.
 
Didn't FFVIII strangely predict the fall of SD Radio Tower based TV and rise of Cable-based HD transmissions, even saying that most video transmissions were now watched online?

Yeah, they predicted the rise of network based media feeds, though the reasoning for the fall of radio was based on external powers making it non-functional as opposed to declining interest.

Even back in 1999 though, Balamb's school intranet was quite advanced for a website, almost Web 2.0-ish.
 
But did he not expose it to a large audience who wouldn't possibly have seen/read/heard of it otherwise?

He did expose the idea to gamers, I guess, but I hesitate to call the idea presented in that game mysteriously predicting the future when sci-fi writers have been predicting it since at least as far back as the seventies.
 
It's not a game, but Serial Experiments Lain sure predicted a lot about the internet and its integration into society.

It was from 1999.
 
I was playing .hack and saw this forum message in the game. I don't know, I thought it was funny because it could've been a post from here :P. Though this game is from 2003 so it's not that old.

 
No.
I remember mags back then writing that mgs 2 has a weird way of telling the story. Its too much as well not much gaming. I think until uncharted2 or hesvy rain, when cinematic gaming became popular when mgs2 took off.


Perfect dark as my contribution. The game predicted that there will be a black president in the future. I think the time in the game is set in the year 2010.

The media fawned over this game though. I remember people being pissed about the okeydoke he pulled with Raiden online but people loved this game more or less.

Source: posting on gamefaqs in the early 00s
 
With Perfect Dark 64, Rare predicted that U.S would have an African-American president in 2023.

906058-20090228_002307.jpg


It happened a little earlier than that but still. Game was released in 2000.

Beat me to it. The description of the President when you access the computer in the Carrington Institute is funny too.
 
On gaming forums and YT, people would infamously talk shit about MGS 2 for the "bad" story, overboard on silliness, and the most notable and ironic of all : "why am I not playing as Snake?! Kojima lied to us!!"

Well I'm glad I didn't join gaming forum then. And MGS2 pre-dates YT. All those comments you see might as well be coming from the same posters as gamefaqs or whatever neogaf was called back then.
 
The media fawned over this game though. I remember people being pissed about the okeydoke he pulled with Raiden online but people loved this game more or less.

Source: posting on gamefaqs in the early 00s


Yup,I remember posting on gamers.com in 2002-2004 and people liked the the game. And to repeat, yes some people were mad about Raiden and or thought the story was stupid and convoluted ( but you can still find people today that think the story is stupid and convoluted, it's not like the criticism has gone away).

But to act like people generally didn't start thinking MGS2 was good until 2012 or so is not even remotely accurate at all
 
Uh, for the guys saying Tom Clancy stuff...

Pretty much everything in his older writings "becoming true' isn't Nostradamus shit.

It's called having an understanding of international politics beyond what the mainstream media reports. The writing on the wall was there and quite plain from the beginning of Putin's presidency that he was going to try and reclaim old Soviet territories, and after the 2008 invasion, t'was pretty obvious that in the event Ukraine fell out of line that it was next, since it has this amazing magical little thing we call Warm Water Ports. Something Russia has been historically attracted to like flies to shit.

Anyway, my contribution?

Big_Rigs_-_Over_the_Road_Racing_Coverart.png


Big Rigs predicted low quality and broken early access games from shady developers oversaturating Steam, a handful of them being from none other than the director of Big Rigs!
 
Deus Ex and memory was mine, so good job first poster.
MGS 2 got backlash for the majority of the time after its release by fans for some pretty petty reasons.

Hell, I would say it wasn't until 2012-2013 when I saw people admit it was good.
Whaaat? MGS2 was very well received.
Yeah it was weird, it got amazing reviews at launch and within a year a lot of the same people who gave it high reviews were trashing it. There was a huge backlash.
As a cursory reader of game magazines in the early oughts (when Next Generation folded mostly just EGM with random GP & NP, plus random issues of PC mags) MGS2 was huge, and the enthusiast press was hilariously careful about the twist. But previews & reviews, glowing. Yet, years later, they seemed sheepish on their best of lists, and were upset about the twist.

As an internet denizen, MGS2 was ripped on various sites and I wasn't even paying much attention because I owned a Dreamcast and was on a break from gaming. That said the first internet based article pushback I saw started with the prolific (insert any additional adjective of choice) Tim Rogers in Insert Credit, '02 ish. The man needs a copy editor, but a heck of a counterpoint to what the forums had settled into at that point.

So yeah, the same cycle we see often about modern games. Just a little slower.
 
Mega Man Battle Network predicted smart devices and seemingly everything having an internet connection. Only a matter of time before we have to deal with computer viruses in our toilets.
 
I think time has distorted how people viewed MGS2 when it first came out. I thought most people loved it. It's just recently people really got it. Was there a re-release that spiked interest again?
 
Deus Ex!

- Increasingly powerful governments
- Excessive police violence
- Economic turmoil
- Solace in technology (see below)
- Increased governmental / corporate collaboration
- Privatization of public services
- Major terrorist attack on NYC landmark
- Growing class divisions
- Heightened paranoia and suspicion of fellow citizens pushed by the media outlets out of fear

Just look at this (hidden) conversation with an AI sequestered away in the basement of an old-money plutocrat's Paris home:

JC Denton: I don't see anything amusing about spying on people.

Morpheus: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

JC Denton: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

The game predicted post-2001 America (well, whole world actually) better than almost anything else I've seen. Despite some hamfisted writing here and there it is startlingly on point.
 
I think time has distorted how people viewed MGS2 when it first came out. I thought most people loved it. It's just recently people really got it. Was there a re-release that spiked interest again?

The release of the HD remaster included in the MGS HD Collection in 2011 was probably a catalyst for new discussion about the game, given it was the first release since Substance came out in '03. EDIT - I am not counting the 2008 'Essential Collection' PS2 release given that it was on the same machine.

I know that's the point at which I remember seeing more threads about the game at least, mainly from new players.

I was firmly in the camp of loving the game at the time of release without fully understanding the intricacies of the plot (well I was a dumb 13 year old at the time) but really found a new level of enjoyment replaying it in early 2012 at which point some of the crazier scenes later in the game seemed weirdly prescient.
 
You guys should check out Uknighted's twitch stream when threedog does a MGS2 playthrough. He is extremely knowledgeable about the game and explains how and why the game is made the way it is. MGS2 was a game Kojima made for his self expression.
 
Deus Ex!

- Increasingly powerful governments
- Excessive police violence
- Economic turmoil
- Solace in technology (see below)
- Increased governmental / corporate collaboration
- Privatization of public services
- Major terrorist attack on NYC landmark
- Growing class divisions
- Heightened paranoia and suspicion of fellow citizens pushed by the media outlets out of fear

The game predicted post-2001 America (well, whole world actually) better than almost anything else I've seen. Despite some hamfisted writing here and there it is startlingly on point.
These are all things that happened in the 80s outside of a major terrorist attack on New York.

It's not strange at all for a game to "predict" these things because we've already seen them happening for generations.
 
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