[Mustard Broach]

For some inexplicable reason (I'll blame my triple digit fever), I have a desire to put together a list of movies that had scenes featuring video games (but not movies based on/around video games, so The Wizard, Tron and Grandma's Boy, for instance, don't count.)

The one that always comes to mind for me is the scene in Boyz N The Hood when you see a closeup of Doughboy's face and hear him say "Watch me shoot this motherfucker." only to discover he's playing Duck Hunt.

The Last Starfighter had a couple of video game scenes, though they were directly connected to the plot so I'm not sure if that fits into my criteria or not. (Random Fact: The director of The Last Starfighter played Michael Myers in the original Halloween movie. He also directed Major Payne.)

Do I correctly remember that the movie Cloak & Dagger involved scenes from the arcade game of the same title?

I'm sure there are a ton of movies that aren't coming to mind. I'm also sure that people here will remember them.

[Boco]

Not only did Cloak & Dagger feature the arcade game of the same name, in the fiction of the movie it was about a home console release of the game (which doesn't exist). The scenes involving gameplay were actually done by having one person play the arcade game in a place the camera couldn't see and a second person pretending to play using an Atari controller.

[etabeta]

you might want to check also this page

http://www.mameworld.info/mameinfo/movies/

[ICEknight]

There's some footage of a prototype version of Sonic 1 (with moving UFOs/planets in Marble Zone's sky), in Wayne's World.

I also remember watching a movie when I was little, that had the little kid playing Castle of Illusion, with the music and sound effects not matching the gameplay being displayed. It might have been just one of those dime-a-dozen TV movies, though.


EDIT: Oh, and isn't there some actual game footage in the House of the dead movie?

[Nosuch]

I vaguely remember a small scene with Super Mario 3 in the first Beethoven movie. The dialogue made it sound like they were playing a two-player simultaneous mode in the main game.

[Ichiban Crush]

Having been watching crappy movies on Netflix, I spotted a couple:

In Cool As Ice, the little brother of the love interest is playing Super Mario 3 and Tecmo Bowl. Unlike most movies, they left the original sound effects intact instead of replacing them with generic Atari-esque noises.

Every arcade machine in RoboCop 2 were all Data East games. Probably because they did the arcade/NES/GameBoy games for the first RoboCop (Ocean did the one for RoboCop 2 for NES, and it was horrid. No, I wouldn't buy that for a dollar.)

[Richter Belmont]

I've always found videogame appearances in movies fascinating as well. I enjoy challenging myself to see if I can determine things like which arcade games are in the background, what game they are playing, or where the sound effects came from.

It's interesting how many times, they replace the sound effects and/or music with stock sounds- but even moreso, how those stock sound effects are quite likely to simply be from OLDER video games (Atari 2600 Pac-Man is a very common replacement, I've noticed), which potentially defeats the legal benefit of using stock sound effects.

The most recent observation I made was while watching Season 1 of Fraggle Rock on Netflix. I noticed that in Episode 14 (The Challenge), when Doc and Sprocket are playing the computer game "Zombie Attack", the sound effects are a hodgepodge of sounds, including some samples that are distinctively from the arcade versions of Galaxian and Pac-Man.

[timebombtown]

The first "3 Ninjas" movie also had a scene that featured "Super Mario Bros. 3", if I recall correctly. That game sure got around in 1990s Hollywood.