8 Insane Inventions Ripped Straight From Video Games

Despite the expectation that video games provide escapism for us all by transporting us to lush worlds and letting us do things we can’t in real life, they can still influence reality in some wildly unexpected ways.

Though many games feature wildly outlandish weapons, gadgets, items, and so on which can simply never exist in our non-digital waking world, sometimes outside-the-box inventors can find ways to replicate head-spinning video game tech away from the game itself.

While we can’t say for sure that each of these games were the direct inspiration for these inventions, it’s nevertheless incredibly easy to draw some lines of causality and infer that the chances are pretty damn good.

And even if not, the fact that these inventions appeared first in video games years earlier is wild, again proving that for as outlandish as the medium can be, it’s also fundamentally built on the same rules that govern our own waking lives.

And so, it just makes you wonder which video game objects will next see the light of day outside of games. Gravity Gun? Portal Gun? Yeah, probably not, but we can dream, right?...

Ace Combat's Tactical Laser System (TLS) is an experimental laser weapon which can attach to a player's aircraft, allowing them to paint a target and then annihilate it with a devastatingly powerful laser blast.

The TLS was first introduced in 2004's Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, and though its power has changed numerous times over the years for the sake of balance, it seemingly eventually caught the attention of aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Martin.

In 2020, the company announced their "Directed Energy" initiative - a laser defense weapons system which could, like Ace Combat's TLS, be mounted to a plane's fuselage, used to paint a target, and then near-instantaneously shoot it out of the sky.

Lockheed Martin even included a test video on their website showing the laser in action, and while it's entirely possible the company came up with such tech independently, it sure is amusing - and also a teensy bit scary - to consider them getting the idea from Ace Combat.