Fancy taking the piss out of video games? Here you go, a fun little tool you can run in your browser easily lets you rewrite famous game quotes. The Death Generator offers a gallery full of (mostly) retro games and a simple text box that will replicate the exact font used by those games, all so you can make the little shopkeeper in Zelda say rude words, or entirely rewrite the pre-mission dossiers of Goldeneye 007. There’s a lot more than that though. I’ve done a bunch, come see what I mean and have a go yourself.
You can mess about with the FBI warning that famously told every arcade visitor in the United States (and beyond) that “Winners don’t do drugs”. You can play with Dracula’s existentialist screed in Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. Or reimagine the letter Princess Peach sends to her plumber pal in Super Mario 64.
But my favourite is probably the Metal Gear Solid one, because it not only lets you re-type the text of your codec conversations, it also lets you customise who is in the call. You can make up conversations with Otacon, Mei Ling, the Colonel, Meryl, and Naomi – it even lets you choose how many bars of reception is showing. The attention to detail is admirable.
You can also just type in a small phrase and hit a dice button to cycle through the screens at random, just to see how your words might fit if, say, Sub-Zero were speaking them. Or perhaps you were not happy with the way Bloober Team remade Silent Hill 2, in which case you can begin the process of writing your own adaptation, starting with Mary’s famous letter to her caring husband.
And finally, no collection of famous gaming screens would be complete without this scene from Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which I have left untouched and reproduced here in its original unaltered form, out of respect for the fallen, you understand.
The tool is made by programmer “Foone” who shared it on Bluesky. “I’ve got 270 games in it so far and I’m adding more all the time,” they said on the social media site. “The most recent one is the GBA Kingdom Hearts game, Chain of Memories. That one’s fun because it’s full of Disney characters.”
The coder then posted an image of Winnie The Pooh swearing. Excellent. Go see if you can top that, readers. Have fun!