How Game Developers Have Implemented In-Game Meme References to Massive Viral Success

By Zach Sweat

The video game industry has exploded over the last few years, with the global gaming market valued at a whopping $173.70 billion in 2021, which is expected to nearly double by 2027. Alongside this massive growth, the ability for the plethora of game developers to connect with fans and consumers has shifted exponentially as competitors vie for attention online.

Coinciding with this, gaming-related memes have been increasingly more prevalent as of late, and as brands and developers in the sector attempt to use such memes as a way to connect or appeal to potential customers, an understanding of internet culture has evolved into one of the most important means of using memes as an effective marketing and communication tool.

More often than not, brands who try to use memes fail miserably at truly understanding the minutiae of the internet, but that doesn’t mean they all wind up falling victim to appearing cringe and out-of-touch with the classic pitfall referred to as “How Do You Do Fellow Kids?”

One method game developers have used to reach online audiences is putting references to memes and internet culture directly into their games. Numerous times when a game dev has chosen to include a meme spawned from their relevant communities, fans react with excitement and share their findings on social media — resulting in a viral post that not only generates organic awareness but also praise from buyers.

In order to get a better sense of how to successfully navigate the use of internet culture in video games, we’ll take a look at some of the biggest success stories from recent years and how they managed to pull it off, as well as why they actually were considered successful.

“Craig the Brute” in Halo Infinite

If you look back on the initial reveal of “Halo Infinite” at the Xbox Games Showcase in July 2020, the immediate fan reaction was largely negative, mainly due to issues with the graphics quality. During this contentious unveiling, the meme character known as “Craig the Brute” was organically born from the community’s response to a lackluster enemy that Master Chief battled during the eight-minute demo.

Considering the overwhelmingly negative feedback of “Halo Infinite” when it was initially shown off and the birth of the Craig the Brute meme as a result, Microsoft was essentially left with two options — embrace the community’s meme or ignore it and stubbornly press onward.

In the days following the wave of backlash toward “Halo Infinite,” Head of Xbox Phil Spencer made the clever decision to embrace Craig and even name him the “Official Xbox mascot,” effectively recognizing both the meme and the community’s feedback about the game’s graphics.

Jumping up to the game’s ultimate release in November 2021 after a lengthy delay, Xbox managed to pull another win out of Craig the Brute by surprising fans with a slew of easter eggs referencing the community’s meme in-game.

Within just a few weeks upon release, hundreds of posts on social media from fans noted Craig’s inclusion in “Halo Infinite” via a memorial to the character in the campaign mode, an in-game vinyl record adorned with Craig’s face and mountains and rocks carved to resemble the Brute that were each widely shared on across numerous platforms throughout the first month of the game’s release.

Many of these posts from players accumulated thousands of likes, shares and comments, effectively becoming an organic source of promotion for “Halo Infinite” that praised Xbox for both acknowledging the meme and paying tribute to something fans created just a year before release.

While Xbox and Microsoft could have easily ignored the meme, especially due to its negative association with the game’s poor initial showing, they embraced it and turned a mocking meme into something fans were excited to share with the internet.

“Always Has Been” in Apex Legends

Unlike the previous case with “Halo Infinite’s” rocky reveal and community-born meme, Respawn Entertainment’s battle royale “Apex Legends” was largely praised upon release, but they too managed to successfully implement an in-game meme reference that was well-received by players recently.

Just last week during a bit of downtime for “Apex,” which is currently in-between seasons, Respawn dropped an in-game item for players on its store that fans are now raving about online. What we’re referring to is the new holospray item that directly references the viral “Always Has Been” meme.

To add a little background on this meme, “Wait, It’s All Ohio? Always Has Been” dates back to 2018 but truly broke into the mainstream in mid-2020 when it was seemingly everywhere on the web being remixed into hundreds of variations. The meme ultimately became such a hit that it landed the no. 4 spot on our “Top 10 Memes of 2020” list.

Beyond a simple reference to this meme in “Apex,” the “Always Has Been” holospray also pays tribute to a common gameplay aspect in the title known as “third parties,” which refers to when a “third party” jumps into an ongoing fight between two other players for an easy kill. This demonstrates not only a knowledge of meme culture but also something the community has coined as a known element of “Apex’s” gameplay.

It’s also worth pointing out that Respawn managed to do the seemingly impossible by turning an in-game item that costs real money (a notoriously contentious trend among gaming in recent years) into something that fans not only loved but organically shared and praised on various platforms.

Posts noting the in-game item and meme reference were shared on Reddit, Twitter and other sites by fans who took notice of the clever nod to internet culture, racking up high engagement numbers across the board, and proving once again that successfully referencing a meme can lead to big wins among players online.

“Enderman / Slenderman” in Minecraft

“Minecraft” is a standout among video games with a rich history of memes, but way back in the early days of the game, a simple nod to one of the most viral internet characters of all time proved to be a massive hit among fans, serving as our next success story.

Back in mid-2011, “Minecraft” creator Markus “Notch” Persson added a new enemy type to the game known as “Enderman.” While not necessarily obvious to those who weren’t familiar with this era of internet culture, Enderman is a subtle reference to the creepypasta known as “Slenderman,” which was actually stated by Notch himself.

Both an ingenious way to throw a nod to the massive phenomenon of Slenderman (coincidentally our highest viewed entry of all time) and a way to drum up hype for a new addition to “Minecraft,” this decision by the game’s creator similarly resulted in a flood of positive reactions and posts across the internet at the time of its inception.

Even to this day, over 11 years later, Enderman remains one of the most beloved “Minecraft” characters and is frequently discussed, memed, referenced in fan art and more all around the web — which is at least partly due to the decision to tie it into Slenderman.

Fortnite

If you were forced to pick a single game that’s had more success with implementing memes into it than any other, “Fortnite” would easily take the crown, and there are a lot of various ways Epic has managed to pull this off time after time. “Fortnite” has done this so many times that we could almost do an entire piece on just these, but for brevity, let’s take a look at some of the biggest successes it’s had over the years.

Meme Dances

“Fortnite’s” many meme-related dances have become one of the game’s most famous viral elements since it launched in 2017. From the Floss dance to Orange Justice and the Carlton dance, Epic is among the best when it comes to cracking the code on successful meme references in-game.

Back in 2017, the dance trend known as “The Floss” exploded onto the scene and quickly became one of the most viral dances of all time thanks to the “Backpack Kid” popularizing it on Instagram before it spread elsewhere. In December that year, “Fortnite” added the dance as an in-game emote for players to purchase as a direct nod to the meme and trend.

Within the following year, and even to this day, “Fortnite’s” decision to reference this meme proved to be one of the most viral moments of the massively popular game in its entire existence as it eventually became known to many as simply “The Fortnite Dance.”

There are several other “Fortnite” dances that are considered successful meme-related references, such as the “Orange Justice” dance based on the viral video “Orange Shirt Kid,” and the Carlton dance based on the classic dance routine performed by Alfonso Ribeiro from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”

“Thanking the Bus Driver” and Meme Dances in Fortnite

In June 2018, a Redditor submitted a post suggesting that Epic add an option to “thank the bus driver” before jumping out of the battle bus at the start of each match in reference to the “People Who Thank the Bus Driver” meme that spawned a week prior and swept across Reddit.

After receiving tens of thousands of upvotes on the post, generating a Change.org petition with thousands of signatures and more posts from the community voicing their support for it, Epic eventually released an update about two months later that added the feature for players to, you guessed it, thank the bus driver before parachuting out of the flying school bus.

What’s unique about this case is that the meme itself was still quite a fresh trend at the time, being only about a week old before the viral campaign launched to get it added to the game. So when Epic delivered just two months later, the reception from fans was massive and positive as people expressed their adoration for the nod to the meme.

Guides teaching players how to perform the meme reference in-game subsequently appeared in numerous publications, including Forbes, further providing “Fortnite” with organic promotion of the game. During season eight of “Fortnite,” they even included a “Weekly Punchcard” granting players in-game experience for performing the action.

There are many, many other examples out there of video games adding nods to meme and internet culture via in-game items, emotes, easter eggs and more, but these are among the biggest success stories from over the last decade, and each of them showcases a unique way to do so. These examples show that a knowledge of memes from brands can lend itself to successfully engaging with consumers and fans, who will often organically praise and promote a game in doing so.

All that being said, it’s not as simple as tossing in any old meme reference in your game and watching the community love pour in, which is where successes vs. failures come in — that takes knowledge and expertise of the online world. KYM Insights offers such understanding and information to brands so they can successfully do things like this themselves while avoiding becoming the latest viral “corporate meme cringe.”

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Know Your Meme Insights is a team of dedicated experts backed by the world’s largest internet culture database dedicated to researching and documenting online history and viral phenomena. Our influencer reports fuse current trends and historical data with actionable insights with curation where you need it: audience makeup, brand safety and more.

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