This YouTuber is tracking down the games hidden in TV and movies

I grew up with a stay at home mom who would fold laundry and watch police procedurals: Law and Order, CSI, Criminal Minds, and other similar shows. The genre has a few common tentpoles that show up in case after case: suspicious spouses, overbearing husbands, hidden murder weapons, and innocent civilians stumbling across dead bodies. But as the world has advanced, and technology has become more ubiquitous, these shows have evolved to match. Now, you can see witnesses playing a hot new game, or detectives exploring a cyber realm of crime hidden inside a popular MMO.

These scenes usually draw derision from gamers; there's often some kind of silly flaw, like a kid playing League of Legends on his PlayStation 4 with an Xbox controller. I've seen critics refer to an unpolished section of a new release as coming across like a fake game cooked up for an episode of Special Victims Unit. It's something I've noticed but never really considered much until I found a channel based on investigating the source of each game that pops up in the background of a show.

Lunchb0xGamez has a series of shorts based on investigating questions like, "What game is Leech playing in his padded cell prison in X-Men: The Last Stand?"

It's not always as simple as finding the date that a scene was filmed and looking up popular games that released at the time. Sometimes, producers will use trailer footage for cancelled games, or in-progress prototypes from companies that went under. It's significantly cheaper to use an unfinished product than license a finished title, after all, and it helps explain why so many of these games feel so uncanny.

Many of these shorts are interesting because these games aren't the focus of the shot; Lunchb0x has to compare blurry screenshots and scraps of footage, looking at the colors of each level, the animations and silhouette of the protagonist on screen, and other clues gleaned from just a few seconds of a screen in the background.

It's not surprising that these videos can rack up millions of views; they strike a nice balance that a lot of short-form content misses. The investigations are educational, if a bit niche, and it's interesting to learn about cancelled games, obscure titles, and homages hidden in movies and TV.

I've always taken the snippets of gameplay you see in the background of other media for granted. It's cool to see a creator take the time to dig into each frame, cross-referencing them with big releases and re-discovering lost media. I've enjoyed watching Lunchb0x's detective work, and getting a little extra visibility into something I took for granted.