Today we’re looking at Decline of Video Gaming. Not the concept of the decline of video gaming, that’s another article, we’re looking at the flash series named Decline of Video Gaming, with no “the” at the beginning. It’s a video game parody cartoon from the early 2000s, so you already know what to expect; pointing out the absurdities in games and some lolsorandom humor. Thankfully there are no jokes about Mario doing drug mushrooms. It’s not that cliched. I used to love the series back when I was a kid, and thought it would be interesting to revisit it as an old man and see if it holds up.
This is a reaction article. It should have been a video, but I don’t make videos. Not yet at least.
I recommend you watch the cartoons first, then re-watch while pausing and reading the article. I suggest watching them on Newgrounds, where they’re available in full quality. Then watch them on Youtube, so you can pause and rewind as much as you want.
The series’ first episode is very simple compared to the others. The art has this distinctly early 2000s flash cartoon look to it, with the thin lines and tweened puppet animation. Thankfully the colors look alright. They didn’t go for the garishly over saturated colors popular at the time, or even- God forgive me for uttering these words- gradients. They do use them, in the Lara Croft segment, but at least they had the restraint to limit it there.
It’s the year 2059, and gaming has gone down hill. At least, according to the overly long intro. The cartoon focuses on three friends, Dim, JT and Dan (the cartoon’s creators) hanging around an EB Games. The guys wander around, pointing at games, and showing little skits parodying them, in Family Guy style cutaways.
First they parody Metal Gear Solid. They reminisce about Metal Gear Solid V, making jokes about playing as old man Snake. This was five years before the release of MGS4, where old Snake is the protagonist. Thought that was interesting.
Next they point out Devil May Cry 4, with Lucia on the cover alongside Dante and Trish. The guys look back on the first Devil May Cry, as the finest in the series, and lament its downfall. This one’s completely understandable. With this cartoon’s release and the fact that they feature Lucia as a character, it means the last game they played was the second one. That would give anyone a grim outlook on the series. Thing is, this cartoon was made barely a year before Devil May Cry 3. That must have been an interesting time for gamers. A strong first entry, then a truly putrid sequel that gets followed up by an unexpected masterpiece a few years later. It was a real “it’s always darkest before the dawn” type moment.
They take a light jab at Alien Hominid, a run and gun game made by the Newgrounds guys. It was a huge deal for me at the time. It was the first real indie game I saw on consoles. Back then, it was a lot less common. Sure, anyone could make a little flash game and publish it on a website like Newgrounds or Miniclip, but consoles were the big leagues. That’s where Mario and Master Chief were, that was no place for people from the internet (said with utmost disgust). It made me think Newgrounds was a real cultural force and that anything was possible. I was wrong on both fronts.
I used to think the Zelda parody was hilarious as a kid, not so much now. Nothing more to say about it, other than “The Lampshade of No Real Significance” got kind of popular in online circles, and the guys who made Decline of Video Gaming made a flash game of it.
Then they look at Ghetto Party 5. A play on Mario Party and all the gangsta themed games of the time. The 2000s were the Bling era. Huge shirts, huge pants, huge chains. Everything was about “the streets”; You needed to be a “baller” and maybe even a “shot caller”. That’s when Fast and Furious rose to prominence along with all the street racing games like Need for Speed Underground, Midnight Club and Juiced. Everything was about being gangsta. It was like the 90s, where every white guy was rapping, but somehow even more embarrassing.
P. Diddy shows up there. That’s the only funny part of the skit, and it wasn’t intentional. If Diddy shows up at a party, a drive-by would be the least of MC Hammer’s worries. Diddy would take “Can’t touch this” as a challenge.
Grand Theft Auto gets a shout-out with Grand Theft Auto Traffic Jam. This is getting close to Mario drug mushroom jokes. What if Grand Theft Auto, but realistic traffic is an easy joke, and this one isn’t very funny.
The Tomb Raider bit is one I think about whenever I see RPG systems in games that don’t need them, which is a lot of them nowadays. I was going to reference it in my Tomb Raider review, but I thought no one would get it- which hasn’t stopped me before- but here you go, now you know it, too.
The first episode is a nice bit of nostalgia. Its slower pace and more relaxed tone make it stand out from the over the top shock cartoons on Newgrounds back in the day.
The animation also helped it stand out. Even if it looks crude now, it was of a higher quality than what you’d normally find online. All the little game boxes have their own complete designs and jokes, it all looks detailed and put together.
I still don’t know why I found it so hilarious back in the day. Maybe I’m just a bored, bitter old man now who can’t see joy or whimsy in anything. It’s still a nice watch, don’t regret revisiting it, and would recommend you give it a look if you want some early 2000s flash nostalgia.
The second episode gets more of a plot. The guys are invited to E3, but it’s all an evil scheme by the heads of Square Enix, Capcom and Konami, all voiced by Arin “Egoraptor” Hansen, to destroy the guys for all the times they’ve bashed games.
There is more of a focus on the characters this time around. They’re not wandering around a game store, now they wander around E3 while telling jokes. JT was turned into a hyperactive idiot who shouts random phrases and acts like a kid. This kind of character was huge at the time. Think Gir from Invader Zim. Very trendy. The jokes are louder and more “lol so random XD” this time around.
Once the guys get to E3, the game jokes start. They kick things off with an N-Gage joke. For those who don’t know, the N-Gage was a short-lived phone/portable gaming console combo released back in the day. To most of you, the idea of a phone you play games on isn’t anything weird, but it was a novel concept back in the day. It was advertised as the next big thing, but it got laughed out of existence. The design was weird and clunky, it was massive, it looked nerdy as hell and it played terrible demakes of existing games. Any time the N-Gage is brought up, which isn’t often, I always think of this scene, and think “Hey, Dave, this guy bought an N-Gage!”
Then we get introduced to the heads of Capcom, Konami and Square Enix, the bad guys, who bumble around trying to stop the main trio, like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. It’s all silly and pretty funny. The three guys have unique personalities and some funny lines, and even though they’re all played by the same guy, manage to sound distinct.
They use props from their games to carry out their evil plans, like the Capcom guy sending out T-Virus zombies. If you put them in a cartoon in 2026, and had them act the exact same way, no one would be able to tell the difference. Capcom is still milking the Resident Evil franchise, so him only making Resident Evil references would make sense to modern audiences. Same with the Square Enix and Konami guys. If the Super Flash Bros from 2004 travelled into the far-off year of 2026, they’d see that everything is still the same. They’d be excited to check out all the cool new games from the big publishers, only to find the same games they’ve played, but with increasingly bigger numbers tacked on to the end.
After the requisite South Park reference, we get a bit of lol random humor that had a disproportionate impact on me. The Square Enix guy tries to attack JT with a fireball, but he misses because of the Active Time Battle system, and instead hits Tom with the fireball, which sets him on fire and he yells out Oh my god im on fire. For some reason, that was the funniest thing to me back then. I’d quote it endlessly, like a huge nerd, and no one knew what I was talking about. Some things never change.
A few parodies happen, and then the Nintendo DS comes along. The joke is another easy one. The DS has two screens, which is one more than usual, so what if it had more screen?
I remember when I first heard of the DS. A friend told me he saw something about it in a game magazine, and that it was like a Gameboy, but with two screens. I looked him dead in the eye for a bit. Two screens? Really? You expect me to believe that? Why two? So you can play two games at once? Get outta here with that bullshit, man. He kept insisting and even got angry when I wouldn’t believe him, but I just kept calling him a liar. Then I went home and looked it up online, and it was true, and was subjected to the longest “I told you so” in history. Maybe that’s the reason why I never owned a DS. It was a symbol of my moral failings.
The cartoon then closes off with… Maroon 5? Okay there has to be some law against making someone listen to Maroon 5 without their consent.
Episode two is more fleshed out, more dynamic. The characters get more screentime. They’re still props to point at games and trigger the cutaway, but they have more of a personality, even if it’s just one joke. The parodies this time around were a bit weaker, but there are more moments that stuck with me, like the N-Gage bit.
That reminds me of this one time, years ago, when I was looking up information on Xbox 360 emulators. There weren’t any, at the time. Even now, there’s only one and it barely works with anything. I was looking around, trying to see why that is, and among the things I learned about how apparently it’s tough, another reason why is because there isn’t much interest, which shocked me. Then I saw a Reddit post from one guy saying there probably isn’t any interest in it, himself included, since he would rather work on an emulator for the N-Gage, as he was doing.
The N-GAGE!? You’d rather skip over developing the only emulator for the console with Gears of War, Halo, Dead Or Alive and NINJA GAIDEN 2, to develop an emulator for the N-GAGE!? I got legitimately mad at that one. Sure, he says the games aren’t the deciding factor, it’s how interesting the system is. I bet a phone that can play games is real groundbreaking.
Emulating an N-Gage completely defeats the purpose of its existence, too. No, it’s not the ability to play games on the go. The whole thing about the N-Gage was that it was the perfect size, shape, and weight to throw at other people, preferably N-Gage owners.
Now that my N-Gage induced crashout is done, let’s move on to the Christmas special!
I usually have a decline during Christmas, too. Bad weather, mixed with too much food and downtime, usually equals zero productivity and a few extra pounds.
The Christmas episode is a string of vaguely Christmas-themed video game jokes. It’s like a few strips of Penny Arcade back to back, along with violence as the punchline and everything. Don’t have much to say about this one. Didn’t watch it a lot back in the day. It’s still nice, in the same way reading old Penny Arcade comics is still enjoyable.
The Time Crisis carolers scene is really well done, and it’s one of my favorite sequences in these cartoons.
The big one. The third and final (numbered) installment in this epic series. Clocking in at over seventeen minutes. That’s feature-length in the world of flash cartoons.
This one blew my mind back when I saw it. They stepped up the animation, it was a lot longer, there were a ton of jokes. I thought it was TV quality, and you could watch it for free on the Internet, and it was made by some guys and not a massive studio? Amazing.
In this episode, the guys go to Japan, and the three video game villains try to stop them.
A note about the intro: this cartoon was the first time I heard Guns and Roses. True story.
On the subject of music, I haven’t commented much on the soundtrack for these, but they’re from the time where you could take any copyrighted song and slap it on your project. There was a big stink about piracy, but it was mostly focused around filesharing and such. No one would come at you for using a 40 second clip of My Michelle in the intro for your video game cartoon. No one would lose sales over that. If anything, it’s free advertising, but now you get your face slapped off if you put a few notes from a known song in a video. The free advertising thing didn’t work on me, though. I found out about Guns and Roses there, and I don’t like them.
The first game parody is Devil May Cry. The first one, again. DMC3 had just come out, so maybe they hadn’t played it yet. Pretty succinct summary of the first game, but they missed an opportunity to parody the “dark soul with light” scene. I would have wanted to hear Arin try to do the voice crack.
Then the Konami guy is playing with a DSP- a two screen PSP. Nowadays, DSP is more known for playing with something else. Ayooo. I don’t have anything to add other than this terrible joke. Really regretting my decision to do this as a text article and not a reaction video.
After some random shenanigans with the guys in the hotel (no diddy), we get the Metal Gear Solid 3 sequence. A reference to the land of chocolate scene from The Simpsons. I still haven’t played MGS3, but I’ve always liked this scene. It’s nicely animated, and I really like how charming chibi Snake looks. The cut-off at the end when he gets the microwave out is a good bit of comedic timing.
I also liked the gag the comes after it, with them going around the town in anime form, then they show it was just Dim standing there showing them drawings while playing music. I referenced that in my own comics and doodles.
The part with Nightmare working at a fast food joint scratched at something buried deep within my lizard brain. The whole series is nostalgic, but this scene in particular was one my friends and I used to quote on a regular basis. It was a weird feeling, after having seen this so many times, then not having watched it for decades, to re-watch this part and hear “screw this, I’m going to Burger King”. It was like an MK Ultra activation phrase. I suddenly remembered that I used to say that all the time, and I was hit with a sudden realization that it was from this cartoon that I got that from.
Speaking of realizing stuff after watching it dozens of times, this is the first time I notice how the Square Enix guy’s spikes work. After the Nightmare scene, the guys get captured by Konami, and it cuts to Capcom and Square Enix discussing their plan in a janitor’s closet. The scene is shot from the side, and you can see the spikes are around his shoulder, like water wings. I never knew what those were. Maybe it’s a reference to a character in Final Fantasy, but I wouldn’t know. I’ve only played FF6.
The part with Ken Kutagari planning a PSP with two disc drives was something I referenced a lot, too. Any time a new console was announced, I would jokingly ask anyone I was talking to if it had two disc drives. Hideo Kojima is in jail with him, too. Locked up for Metal Gear Solid 2, apparently. If only the guys had seen Death Stranding. They probably would have exiled Kojima, instead.
Next they go on to a craaaaazy Japanese game show. It’s not that crazy, actually, just a quiz show. They could have done a Takeshi’s Castle parody. Another instance of noticing things on the 30th re-watch, the scene behind Square Enix is a recreation of the Last Supper with video game characters.
More stuff happens and then another scene that I constantly reference in my mind, even to this day. Another Metal Gear parody, where Snake gets a gun and goes on a rant describing its little intricacies. Whenever I see a really detailed gun in a game, or hear anyone describe a weapon in depth, I think “and it has a subtle orange flavor”. It’s been a really long time, so the quote got re-written in my memory, but it’s roughly the same.
I also liked the Ratchet and Clank part, even if it’s just a few seconds. I’ve always loved those games, and got really excited when they finally showed up in one of these. The guy who does Ratchet’s voice in this is pretty close to the real voice. One thing about this that always gets me is the sound Clank makes when he pops the toast out. It sounds like a thunderous car crash. Where did they record that sample? A busy intersection outside of a bar?
The robot fight is really cool. It was the most impressive thing to me as a kid. It was insane how they animated all that so smoothly, I couldn’t believe it. It still holds up now. The animation in general is great. It’s not on the same level as some of those animators you see on YouTube nowadays that do these insane sakuga proof of concept things, but those are usually a few seconds, or a minute at most.
The Metroid parody is spot-on. I remembered liking Metroid Prime, but that thing where you lose your powers is kind of annoying. Same thing happens in Symphony of the Night. You start at full strength then get reduced to a dumb little rat. It’s like starting a new job as the supervisor, then getting demoted to office clerk after a day. Even the Square Enix guy likes the Metroid joke.
The Square Enix guy launches his final attack, which does nothing, and the guys finish them off with a bunch of “I’d rather” jokes. Tame ones. They’d rather watch ice melt or play dominoes than play those games. Not like the I’d rathers from the Angry Video Game Nerd. No one was weighing the pros and cons of playing Final Fantasy 7, or having a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in their ear.
That rounds off Decline of Video Gaming. I think it holds up pretty well. It’s definitely a product of the early 2000s, with its type of “um… did you just do that” humor, and the game observations can seem a little simple now, with two decades of hindsight, but it’s still a lot of fun. The animation is good, it uses the tweening well, and its good use of camera angles gives it good visual variety. It’s not stuck on a flat three-fourths scene all the time. It’s very ambitious, and it shows that the people making it were very passionate about their work, and they had a strong desire to improve, and it shows throughout the series.
For me it’s a good shot of nostalgia. These, and many other flash cartoons, were a big part of my childhood. They led me down a dark path of gaming, and constantly making autistic references to things no one knows about. They influenced my sense of humor, too. I was all about that kind of “lol so random” humor, mixed in with media-savvy fourth wall breaking “um… actually” observations. I was insufferable as a kid. Still am, but at least I keep it to myself.
Some stray observations:
The most obvious one is the title, Decline of Video Gaming. It seems kind of weird to call the early 2000s the Decline. Sure, the series starts off in the year 2059, and then mysteriously goes back to modern times with the same characters. Uh oh! Plot hole! Boy I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
The early 2000s were a fantastic time for gaming. Splinter Cell, Mario Sunshine, Ratchet and Clank, Halo, Super Monkey Ball, SSX Tricky. A lot of great games, good hardware. Sure, it’s a joke, haha video games bad, but not really, but still. Any medium that releases Super Monkey Ball cannot possibly be in decline. Maybe a very slow, gradual decline. That might be it. They’re claiming the early 2000s are the peak, and after the peak comes the decline, so it’s perfectly understandable to call that period the decline. That’s stretching it.
Doing the “Favorite game of each year” series, I realized how every year I found less and less games I liked. Sure, you can say it’s nostalgia. Oh, how convenient that the peak of a medium you like coincidentally happened when you were a kid at your most impressionable. Curious. I concede that point, but counter point: I was an impressionable child in the 90s, and I don’t have such fond memories of those games, and two: I played a lot of those games after the fact, due to growing up broke. They still hold up.
Now, granted, we are currently in a pretty alright place. Sure, Triple-A games are slop, and everything is a live service time-sink meant to keep you playing forever and paying for battlepasses, but at least the indie scene is doing alright. We got a bunch of smaller games with worse graphics made by people paid more to work less, with actual gameplay, designed with fun in mind. Great, things are on the up-and-up, but from where I stand, the time from around 2008 to around 2021, was a dark one. I might elaborate on that at some point, but for now, take my subjective anecdotal evidence. It’s my blog, and I pick what we’re hyper fixating on this week.
A second point, that has nothing to do with anything: Why is the Capcom guy the only one with a stereotypical Japanese accent? Square Enix and Konami are both Japanese, too.
To sum it all up, I recommend Decline of Video Gaming. Watch it, share it with your friends. If you were around during that time, enjoy the nostalgia, laugh at the dumb jokes. If you never saw that era, enjoy a genuine gem from then. Get some high-quality nostalgia for a time you never knew. It’s better than experiencing it through Y2K pastiche. It’s fully of its time, down to the dumb jokes and the accents that will make you go “Um… that didn’t age well”, as is the style of the time.
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