We al know the fake “games” that movie characters play that you can immediately tell don’t exist IRL. Well, a Twitter user has recently found what they said to be the fakest one ever—too bad it’s actually a real game, and a great one, too.
i think i've finally found the most "fake game they play in a movie" of all time pic.twitter.com/ITXu9tZ4ob
— bee (@puppycelebrity) June 13, 2026
I see the point. There’s a total lack of visual clutter, which is actually great, but something that you rarely see in a game these days. That’s usually a sign of “fake movie game-itis”—because HUDs are completely irrelevant when nobody’s really keeping track of anything. Lastly, there are three main characters with iconic designs you never saw anywhere else—outside of Assassin’s Creed, that is, which would only come out one year later.
For anyone struggling with the concept, the most informative example for a fake movie game is Paul Verhoeven’s Elle from 2016, which combines actual Styx gameplay with highly sexualized 3d footage seemingly straight out of a ’90s screensaver. You can tell exactly where the game begins and where it ends.
These games also show up in more popular properties, like when Jesse is playing id’s Rage in Breaking Bad:
Except that, despite it having Rage’s assets, you know that’s a presentation made for the show, not the actual game. No way the actual game would have that slow on-rails action and lack of HUD.
To circle back to the top, the game in the tweet is 2006’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. It has some gameplay problems preventing it from achieving greatness, but it has one of the best and most prescient stories ever seen in a game.
Also, writing it off as fake also writes off the original The Longest Journey, too, which is actually one of the greatest, if not the greatest, point-and-click adventure games ever made (despite the vague title that you’d probably see in one of these fake games).
To the poster’s credit, they’re not stating that Dreamfall is fake, only that it’d make for a great fake game to play if you’re a movie character. Still, the tweet was met with a surprising number of replies from people who didn’t know it was real.
"..The Longest journey" huh?…
— Crazyistmanever (@Crazyistmanever) June 13, 2026
I shouldn't.. I really shouldn't…
..I really really shouldn't…
…But now i got to. pic.twitter.com/1XaojssWt6
Imagine if someone were to tell you that The Matrix doesn’t exist. It’s ultra-popular, but ask people born after the ’00s, and a surprisingly high number will tell you they’ve never seen it. They won’t, however, be thinking it’s just a made-up series of elaborate screenshots spread all over the Internet to fool you. Everyone knows that, ironically, The Matrix is real. The same doesn’t apply to games, and many of them, some even truly great ones, might get lost to time. Some might even pass as just some isolated render someone made for fun, to show their ability, or to put in a movie to pass as a real game.
That should open a conversation on how game preservation should go beyond keeping games playable, but documented in a fun and captivating manner, so that we never lose such important parts of video game history.
The post Young gamers think one of the greatest adventure games of all time doesn’t exist appeared first on Destructoid.
