10 Video Games That Were MASSIVE Jokes

You really know you've made it when others start to publicly rip the piss out of you.

The silver screen's cultural importance was confirmed when spoof cinema debuted way back in 1906 - some eight decades or so before Leslie Nielsen and National Lampoon took up the mantle - with the all-child comedy The Little Train Robbery. High fantasy, for years the preserve of multi-face dice (sorry, die) rolling dorks in bookshop basements, knew it was mainstream the moment The Lord of the Rings trilogy inspired a range of naff knockoffs as stocking fillers. Surely we all have an unread copy of The Soddit tucked away in a bottom drawer somewhere?

And video games? Well, it's possible they still aren't taken seriously, but they've been popular enough to parody since the days of Pac-man. It took a bit of time before the industry turned the lens on itself, mind, but eventually it discovered it was more fun to laugh with than be laughed at.

And with so many ludicrous conventions which persist to this day, video games aren't exactly difficult to mock - as the following snarkfests show.

Anyone going into Frog Fractions hoping to learn anything vaguely mathematical - or herpetological, for that matter - is going to come away disappointed by half.

The only common denominator between Jim Crawford's ineffable amphibian arithmetic 'em-up and its prosaic classroom equivalents is that it's of virtually zero educational value. What begins as run-of-the-mill browser teaching software about a frog and his sums soon devolves into a surreal, Dadaist journey through every genre imaginable. There's a text adventure to guide a spaceship back from Bug Mars, a rhythm action segment as the hero frog Hop attempts to become president, and a business sim which sees you flogging bug porn (frogspawn?!) for profit.

Pretty much every video game convention you can think of is ridiculed in some way. There may be no fractions, but it's a wholly unforgettable - and indescribable - experience.