The Hidden Meaning Behind These Video Game Plots

Of all the games on this list, Capcom's Mega Man series definitely seems like the most straightforward. You move through the levels, beat each Robot Master, then take on the evil Dr. Wily in the climax. The only complication is figuring out the proper order that will allow you to exploit each boss's weakness, right? Look a little deeper, though, and it becomes a little more complicated.

Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with Mega Man himself. Instead, it has to do with the human scientists in the games — and the real-life figures that seem to have inspired them. Dr. Thomas Light is pretty obviously named for Thomas Edison, famous for inventing the light bulb. His opposite number, on the other hand, is only really obvious if you dive into the manual and check out his first name.

With his wild hair and mustache, Dr. Albert Wily bears more than a little resemblance to his real-world counterpart, Albert Einstein, especially in his original NES sprite. Considering that he might just be the most well-known and respected scientist of all time — to the point where most people just use his name as a slang term for "genius" — it might be surprising that a megalomaniacal villain bent on world domination would be based on Einstein. Until, that is, you remember that Einstein is also known for his work on the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the invention of the atomic bomb. 

His tie to nuclear weapons, which would proliferate to the point of having the capability to literally destroy the world, gives him a unique connection to the dark side of technology, and the danger that can come even from things that were thought up for peaceful purposes. You know, like the Robot Masters that have turned evil in the game. 

Admittedly, the game character diverged pretty hard from his inspiration — Wily's look became markedly different as the games evolved, and Einstein did not, in fact, live in a series of giant skull-shaped castles. But the connection seems to be there in a way that it isn't for Dr. Light. Unless they spend some time in the next game having him electrocute an elephant, that is. 

Since its 1986 debut on the NES, the Castlevania franchise has expanded and evolved into an incredibly complex saga with a deep (and occasionally nonsensical) storyline. Over the course of dozens of games, players have been told about the intertwined destiny of Dracula and the Belmont bloodline, and the curses and triumphs that have defined their existence for a thousand years.

It makes sense that things would get pretty complex, too, because those games have an awful lot of weird stuff to explain — including how Dracula got to be in charge of all the other monsters and why this family thinks that the best way to deal with this unstoppable force is to hit it with a whip. But while the stories of cruel fate and sacrifice have made for some interesting games, there's a much simpler explanation that's given to us right at the start of the very first game: it's just a movie.

That's the big trick behind the original Castlevania, and why the opening resembles a film strip — and why the ending features movie-style credits with parody actor names. It's not actually meant to be some vast, gothic saga, it's just a crossover where you're fighting against all the famous monsters from the Universal films — like the Mummy, Frankenstein, and, of course, Dracula — with Clash of the Titans' Medusa thrown in for good measure. Even Simon Belmont himself is a movie mashup of Conan's look and a weapon lifted from Indiana Jones. If you missed it in the original game, the opening of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (above) and Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse put the film strip in motion to make it a little harder to ignore. 

It's not until the series moved to the SNES that they thought that it might be time to give the series its own distinct mythology. That might seem a little dismissive given the work later put into the plot, but let's be real: it's better than the origin story we got in Lords of Shadow.

The Twisted Metal series, made up of vehicular combat games about modified cars in a battle to the death, was never exactly wholesome entertainment. With 2001's Twisted Metal Black, though, Incognito Entertainment took the series in an incredibly grim direction, which is saying a lot since the mascot of the franchise was already Needles Kane, a serial killer clown with his head permanently set on fire by demonic forces.

Rather than being set in a near-future Los Angeles with competitors from all over the world, Black's Twisted Metal tournament drew its cast from the inmates of Blackfield Asylum, including killers, cannibals, and, in one case, a woman who had her face permanently encased in a porcelain doll's mask in order to disfigure her features. It's dark stuff, but it gets even darker at the end of each character's storyline, where their wishes are granted with either more brutal bloodshed, or the kind of Monkey's Paw irony that makes them truly regrettable. But while each story takes its own share of turns, there's one final twist to the metal that requires a whole lot of effort to uncover.

Once you beat the game with every other character — including the secret ones that you unlock during the game — you'll get access to Minion, an armored big-rig that serves as a mid-game boss. Play through as him, and you'll notice that unlike the others, he doesn't have dialogue on the loading screens, just sequences of numbers. Each number, of course, corresponds to a letter, and if you take the time to decode them, you'll find that Minion's driver believes that everything that's happening in the game is taking place inside Sweet Tooth's mind.

The kicker? It's also revealed that Minion is Marcus Kane, who is not only Needles' alter ego, but the character in Twisted Metal 2 who speaks directly to the player and knows that it's all a video game. Either way, the fact that the game world is created within the disturbed mind of a murder clown goes a long way towards explaining why it's so dark, and why the people who get the worst endings are authority figures.

If you have even a passing interest in the history of video games, then you likely already know that Mario got his start as "Jumpman," the protagonist of Shigeru Miyamoto's Donkey Kong. Eventually, he'd go on to be one of gaming's iconic characters. But while he's found success in tennis, go-kart racing, soccer, partying, princess-rescuing, and occasionally being made of paper, he's been referred to consistently as a plumber by trade ever since the early days.

The reason here is simple: after Donkey Kong, his next breakout hit was the original arcade Mario Bros., which used sewer pipes as a way to explain where all the enemies came from. When that game was expanded into Super Mario Bros., arguably the most influential video game of all time, the pipe motif stuck. This time, though, they were different — they appeared as part of the landscape, leading not to sewers, but to underground caves. By Super Mario Bros. 3, there was even an entire country built out of those famous green pipes, as you can see in the video above.

So while Mario has been changing careers ever since he started climbing up skyscrapers with a hammer, his experience with pipes and plumbing was the one that came to define him — and not just because it's the kind of profession that makes him an everyman hero and gives a little fun to his fantasy-world exploits. 

In the Mushroom Kingdom, pipes seem to either be naturally occurring geographical features or the last ruins of some ancient society that Peach and the Toads have built their new homeland on. Either way, the Warp Zones prove that pipes have some strange mystical properties, so in that world, a "plumber" isn't just someone you call when your kitchen is ankle-deep in water. 

The Toads would see someone who had the ability to manipulate and connect pipes as something more like a mystical wizard, in the same way that we'd see someone who could, say, effortlessly travel from one mountain to the next in an instant, as a pretty impressive warrior. You even have to go through pipes to reach Bowser's castle! In that respect Mario's expertise with pipes means that he's anything but an "everyman" in the Mushroom Kingdom — he's actually the perfect hero for this very strange world. 

Despite a rather unfortunate revival in 2015, the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise ruled extreme sports games for a decade. In 2003, Neversoft and Activision evolved the franchise by adding something that went beyond just new tricks or more ridiculous rails to grind: a narrative. The game follows a player-created character as you rise up from street skating in your local neighborhood to corporate sponsorship, and all the way back to finding the true meaning of skating within your own soul.

Through the story, you have to deal with your hometown rival, Eric, as he steals your accomplishments, sabotages your competitions, and even frames you for crimes, all in the name of getting a big sponsorship and staying a pro tour. The thing is, the conflict between sponsorships and the true meaning of skating is one that can hit pretty close to home for Hawk himself, who was, and is, the most famous name in skateboarding, as evidenced by the fact that you were playing the fifth major video game with his name in the title.

But with that fame came criticisms that Hawk was a sellout who only cared about getting corporate money, who didn't care about really skating on the street. By lending his name and image to a game that was about rejecting sponsorship if it meant compromising your morals and devoting yourself to the sport, Hawk was able to indirectly answer his critics — and, incidentally, make a ton of money in the process. As Hawk says himself, "you only get called a sellout when people buy your stuff."