Yesterday evening, Sean Spicer took to the press briefing room to criticize the media for how it had emphasized the low attendance at President Trump’s inauguration the day prior. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” he said. Minutes later, the Internet unleashed its latest meme.
Sean Spicer lied, as press secretaries, and the governments they serve, are wont to do. But perhaps because Trump had only been President for a day, and because of both how unnecessary the lie was and how easy it was to fact-check it, the Internet ran with it. People lie all the time, especially in politics. Most of them just happen to be much better at it than Sean Spicer.
People lie in video games too. “Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle,” isn’t a lie per se, but by the fourth or fifth castle, it starts to feel more than a little dishonest. Trailers for games can lie, depicting things that don’t ever actually make it into the finished product, or don’t look half as good when they finally do. Sometimes the people who make games say certain things will happen in them, even when those things sound too good to be true. And then some games we are told will eventually come out one day just vanish without a trace.
So it’s only natural that the new Sean Spicer “period” meme would have plenty of video game-centric iterations. Some of the best ones are below: