10 Amazing Pieces Of Video Game Foreshadowing
Spoiler Warning: spoilers about secret spoilers.
We might think spoiler warnings are a modern phenomenon, a consequence of widespread, immediate communication via the internet combined with a set of blabbermouths on social media who can't, or won't, whether through stupidity or spite, keep their proverbial flaps shut.
But they've actually been around a lot longer than all that. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho insisted viewers "keep the story a secret". Earlier still, Les Diaboliques (from the same pen as Psycho's source novel), likewise urged punters to stay mum on what they'd just seen.
It's not something that unduly troubled video games in their infancy though - probably because most of its plots revolved around GET HIGH SCORE TO WIN. As the medium has grown in sophistication, so too has its narratives, and with it, plot details have become just as important as gameplay. We no longer know that a game will end with your generic dude of choice rescuing a helplessly ensnared or ensorcelled woman - and after timesinks stretching into the dozens of hours, we especially don't want that ending ruined.
Just as well video games are so distracting, then. Look a bit closer in these examples, and you'd unearth all their secrets from the off.
10. Funeral March For Queen Berri (Conker's Bad Fur Day)
Rare's foul-mouthed scuridae-sim isn't shy about parodying Hollywood, albeit with an extra layer of profanity, spoofing everything from Blue Velvet to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. So it's unlikely anybody batted an eyelid at the intro during their first playthrough, an almost direct rip of A Clockwork Orange's famous milk-sipping curtain-raiser.
The opening of the Kubrick classic is overlayed by Wendy Carlos' electronic interpretation of Henry Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary, written in 1696 as a sepulchral dirge for the deceased Mary II. The piece has no special significance to Alex DeLarge, but its mournful lugubriousness has added meaning in Conker.
At the end of the game, the scatological squirrel's would-be bride Berri is rather carelessly killed and then sucked into space. Suddenly, the game's exordium - which takes place at the end of the story - adopts a whole new, infinitely more depressing meaning.