Gamespotting: The Avengers

Posted by on May 6, 2012 in Movies

In The Avengers, as Robert Downey Jr chews high-tech scenery on the control deck of the SHIELD helicarrier, he observes that someone is playing Galaga. It’s just a throwaway joke in a string of throwaway jokes. But the difference is that it’s not thrown away. It’s a setup for a visual gag that scores a place in the credits for Galaga creator Namco.

But is Galaga the right choice? If you want to include a gag about a young technician playing videogames in a high-tech control room, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to go with Team Fortress, Skyrim, Counter-Strike, or Modern Warfare? Just work your way down the Steam usage statistics until you get to the highest paying product placement. Or maybe you should just go with Farmville to ensure the greatest number of people in the audience gets the gag?

But like so many other things in The Avengers, this is a nod to boys of a certain age. The Tony Stark of the Iron Man movies and now The Avengers is the right age and exactly the right demographic to identify a Galaga screen. And the audience is exactly the right audience for this fond brief wink.

As for why some young technician on the deck of a helicarrier would set up an emulator to play a 30 year old arcade game…well, who are we to question what SHIELD employees do to entertain themselves? At least it’s work safe.

  • Alistair

    [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/SsLEMl.jpg[/IMG]

    The whole battle at the foot of Stark Tower takes place outside Grand Central, exactly where an identical attack takes place in Crysis 2. The same metallic bipeds tear holes in Park Avenue and are again fought off by a hero in a fancy suit. Clearly a dangerous spot.

  • Alistair

    Looks like image tags don’t work then.

  • tomchick

    Sorry about that, Alistair.  I’m not sure how (or whether…) to enable images in Disqus, but I haven’t intentionally disabled them.

    A few years ago in a Prototype review, I mentioned that New York City is to action games what World War II was to shooters. :)  I think it’s time to move the action back to LA for a while!

  • Alistair

    At least if Capn A and the team had needed help, the protagonist from The Darkness II would have been watching from his penthouse apartment. And Nico Bellic was only a short drive away.

    And if that didn’t work the Men in Black might have been watching from a gargoyle on the Chrysler Building there.

    Now I come to think of it The Daily Planet is only a block away.

    Maybe it’s a ley line.

  • http://twitter.com/kentdoggydog Brian Kent

    Galaga appears in the beginning of WarGames, too! There’s actually a goof where you see David playing and can clearly see his two remaining ships, but, once he dies, it cuts back to a Game Over screen.

  • http://twitter.com/WarpRattler Evaccaneer DOOM

    The funny part is, they spelled “Namco” wrong in the credits. So much for that.

  • Mercanis

    Galaga, like cheese, is inherently funny. I don’t think the joke would work with a modern game.

  • Thither

    In another  nod to video gaming, at one point Hawkeye does the “slide on his knees firing an arrow” move from one of the mid-nineties Avengers beat-em-up arcade games.

  • Cormac

    Perhaps Space Invaders would have made a good gag too? Aliens coming down from the sky to invade earth…

  • Mercanis

    I totally missed the thematic connection of shooting alien creatures… Now the joke makes more sense!