In this universe, are video game developers aware that they're creating actual living beings, with human emotions and needs, every time they finish making a game? It seems like something the developers would discover immediately. It's the same issue this troper has with Toy Story. Do the toy factories know that they are essentially creating life?
I would assume not, if you use Toy Story's logic to explain this. The toys make sure they are not seen doing things; I guess video game characters more or less do the same thing in this universe. As to why this has not been explained in either work, it might be for the best.
This would also explain why King Candy is so surprised about Ralph game-jumping. It's most likely a written rule for any video game character.
This is also the point where King Candy realizes he's not alone and Ralph may actually pose a threat to him.
Video game characters can be seen doing things by themselves during the time when the Arcade is open. It is called Attract Mode.
It's unlikely that it's a written rule. They call game-jumping going Turbo. Surely Turbo wasn't the first character to do it but he's the first to get his game and another game unplugged. They certainly don't seem to be concerned at all about Q*bert and the gang deciding to take up residence in Fix-It Felix Jr. at the end of the film. I suspect that in the Wreck-It Ralph universe cross overs like Capcom vs whatever and Battletoads and Double Dragon started off as a couple of guys who simply forgot to get home before the arcade opened.
Game-jumping is only "going Turbo" when it's done during arcade hours or for the purpose of commandeering/sabotaging another game. Q*bert and friends were integrated into Fix-It Felix Jr. for the purpose of gameplay, so they belong there now and are treated as native characters, plus they were homeless before and had no intention of hurting anyone. As for crossovers, the crossed-over characters may not historically originate from the series whose game they are appearing in, but within the world of that individual game, they belong there because they were programmed to be there.
Presumably humans have no clue that game characters are living individuals, else they wouldn't casually disconnect games and destroy whole populations just because one character was misbehaving.
Or there's (at least) two copies of every character in a fighting game that allows Mirror Matches, one for each possible appearance. There has to be a sprite/model for every appearance (even if it's just a palette swap), so maybe the "alternate" look(s) are considered clones of the "main" look.
To explain it better, picture a Donkey Kong and a Mario Bros. arcade game. While Donkey Kong is a two-player game, it's an alternating one. Which means there only needs to be one "Jumpman" and one "Donkey Kong" in the game. In the case of Mario Brothers, there can be two players at the same time, so there has to be two separate sprites (even though, in this particular case, Luigi, or Player 2, is just a palette swap of Mario, or Player 1). Different sprites equals different characters.
It may also be that there's an actual mirror that gets set up.
Do we know who the publisher(s) of Sugar Rush and Hero's Duty are?
Sugar Rush's developer is Tobikomi, the same as Fix-It Felix Jr. The developer for Hero's Duty is unknown.
According to the fake TV spot for Hero's Duty, it's "Wreck-It Studios". It's hinted that this is a development team working for Tobikomi, likely with the specialty of making more modern, "gritty" types of games. The name is probably intended to be a reference to the game Fix-It Felix Jr. and Ralph himself; he's one of the most popular characters in Tobikomi's library of games.
Why doesn't anybody know of a place where bad guys can win medals? Lets assume that this Bowser has never go-karted, played tennis, gone golfing or been to the Olympics. Zangief is a bad guy who comes from a game where the bad guy can win. So does Kano.
The point isn't just 'winning', as much as 'gaining a reward for heroic deeds'. It helps that the game and it's inhabitants are old-fashioned in the first place. Things like fighting games and racers, the reward is neutral. It's not playing against type.
There are games where you play as the villains; Ralph even has his own game for various Nintendo systems post-movie.
These characters are from the ARCADE.
If Q*bert and his enemies/friends want food, why didn't they just go into Sugar Rush?
Would you want to eat something you just walked on?
Presumably the Surge Protector doesn't allow them to visit any other games, cruel bureaucrat he is.
Think about what Sugar Rush would look like, if just anybody could walk in and start eating the landscape.
Lack of nutritional value?
King Candy seems pretty hostile to outsiders (since he doesn't want anyone to expose him), hence the use of the Fungeon. It seems likely that Q*bert and co would just be booted out upon discovery.
Especially since Q*bert and his compatriots have been around since he invaded and might eventually recognize him.
What happened to all the racers from RoadBlasters or the other drivers from Turbo Time? Wouldn't they have evacuated and thus been homeless in the Grand Central Station?
The unplugging of those games and their subsequent carting out of the arcade might be why getting unplugged is treated like Doomsday. Before then being unplugged due to crashing might not have ever happened in the characters' experience so they saw no reason to evacuate.
The opening montage of Litwak's arcade shows that TurboTime was one of the first games to get unplugged. Since it and RoadBlasters were unplugged simultaneously, that means they were the first unpluggings the game characters ever witnessed and might not have known the people inside the games would get annihilated along with them. Or that they knew they'd be gone but thought they'd come back, as the out-of-order notice says to check back later.
Alternatively: they are there, but we just don't see them. Keep in mind that we have no idea how big the GCS is. There may be several locations within it that we never got to see. And that's not even including places in other games that players never see, like Tappers backstage area, Fix-It Felix Jr.'s junkyard, Sugar Rush's Diet Cola volcano, etc. There could be dozens of homeless characters out there, just off screen.
Or maybe they're all dead, because the arcade's power strip has been replaced in the years since Turbo went rogue, taking a previous Game Central Station with it.
How did we go from Moppet Girl's second game of the day to the arcade closing all of a sudden? We can assume that Litwak's Arcade opens for more than a few minutes at a time, yes? So what happened during all those business hours we skipped over in a single scene transition, before Felix entered Hero's Duty? It may be believed that Felix decided to wait all day to see if Ralph would return on his own before leaving to search for him, and just maybe it took hours for Ralph to scale the Infected Tower... But shouldn't someone have realized that the real Markowski was still back at Tapper's before very long? That should have tipped off the Space Marines as to what Ralph had done long before Felix arrived and informed the unsuspecting Sergeant. About the only way this seems to make any sense is if Markowski slept the whole day straight or didn't make enough commotion to get the attention of an off-duty character in Tapper to let him out, and if either nobody in Hero's Duty cared that there was a team member missing from their formation the rest of the day (or does it have a rotating roster like Sugar Rush?), or Ralph continued to act out Markowski's part in all subsequent games despite the great risk to himself.
Markowski seems to be the local idiot - since him not being there obviously didn't affect the game play the way Ralph's absence does. From the "You get a load of Markowski today?" remark one of Calhoun's soldiers makes, they treat it as, "Markowski's gone, but they can still play the game, we'll finish the day and deal with finding him later."
Given that another Quarter Alert was issued right after Calhoun chews out Ralph, and the latter could not have scaled the tower unmolested by cybugs and/or unseen by the other Marines, the likely explanation is that Ralph found somewhere to hide until the end of the day and no one cared about Markowski's absence.
If a game appears to glitch out, as happened to RoadBlasters and appeared to happen to Fix-It Felix Jr.... wouldn't the first move be to reboot the machine and see if a fresh start fixes things? Especially with an older machine like Felix's? Why leave it on, only to unplug it in morning, without even trying to reboot?
Well, we never really see the exact procedure that Litwak/the repairmen he brings in go through to try and fix the games. Presumably that would help if there was a simpler/more natural problem, but it might not do much considering the problems that would cause those games to go out of order would be a missing object that is vital to the game's normal execution (Fix-It Felix Jr./Turbo Time) or the presence of foreign, malicious code (RoadBlasters). Because of the way things seem to work in the movie's universe, rebooting the machine probably wouldn't create a fresh "copy" of Ralph/Turbo unless they had returned to the game by then.
How many Urban Legends of Zelda were spawned by the events of the movie, anyway? The glitchy crossover between Roadblasters and Turbo Time, Hero's Duty's secret fourth-wall breaking cutscene, King Candy and Vanellope's teleport glitch in Sugar Rush, and Fix-It Felix Jr.'s secret crossover bonus level are all things that wouldn't exist in any other arcade in the world, so when people told their friends about it, it'd make for some interesting rumors.
It's probably a well-known phenomenon in the movie's universe that multiple arcade machines running long enough in close proximity start to display unusual behavior after a while. I bet it has its own Wikipedia page with a list of examples and everything. Probably also why it's apparently standard practice to wait a day and see if the problem fixes itself instead of restarting it.
Building up on your idea, examples are listed by arcade and not by game.
TV Tropes' WMG pages are much more busy in that universe.
They may not be Urban Legends. They may very well be normal parts of life in that universe. We know between Turbo and his behavior being seen as bad mostly because it got two games shut down, not because he was someplace he didn't belong and the ending with Q*bert's game that it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out games like Capcom Vs. started out with an arcade that had the cross over, it becoming popular, the designers intentionally making a Capcom Vs. game.
Ralph tries to make all the Mentos fall into Diet Cola Mountain to set up a beacon. He says one more slam should do it. Then Cybug!Turbo shows up and keeps him from doing it. Okay, but Cybug!Turbo is slamming them pretty hard. Shouldn't that have made them fall in?
Here's one: After Ralph breaks free from Cybug!Turbo's grip and launches himself into his Heroic Sacrifice, why didn't Cybug!Turbo stop him? Was he not aware of what Ralph was trying to do?
Probably not. He's a crazed, murderous (with sadistic tendencies thanks to Turbo's personality) cy-bug now. He probably just thought, "Well, he made that easy."
Turbo had been a Cy-Bug for, what, ten minutes at that point? Even if he understood that Ralph wanted to collapse the Mentos, he wouldn't have known why. He didn't know about what happens when Cy-Bugs see a beacon — when the inevitable occurs, he even shouts, "You fools! Why are you going into the light — "
Ralph is trying to cause specific damage, Turbo isn't. Ralph probably means that one more of his own slams into the Mentos will do the trick, not just any slam.
It's also in Ralph's code to cause damage with his fists that leads to falling debris - he was substituting the Mentos for the Nicelanders' apartments in this instance, just like how Felix used his hammer to repair his face, the broken shuttle, and Vanellope's kart. Cybugs only function according to their own code and that of the things they ingest. And, King Candy wasn't really impacting the Mentos all that much during the battle. I think the only time he did was when he dug his claws into them once.
Moppet Girl seems to be familiar with the arcade— she calls Mr. Litwak over by name, remarks that Fix-It Felix Jr. is a game she enjoys and even appears in the Imagine Spot when King Candy is telling Ralph that it's unsafe for Vanellope to race. So why does she react to the fifteen-year-old Sugar Rush as though she's never seen it before?
Just because the game is 15 years old, doesn't mean Litwak's has had it for 15 years.
Why was the final fight between Ralph and Cybug!King Candy so short? And why did Cybug!King Candy just want to pick Ralph up off the volcano? (He has no idea about the bonus level, btw.)
The fight was short because it was a Curb-Stomp Battle. As for why Candy just picked up Ralph rather than killing him, it's so they could both watch Vanellope die. He even says so: "Let's watch her die together, shall we?"
It was short 'cause Ralph wasn't even fighting back. He was trying to bring the Mentos down before the Cy-bugs ate everybody, so he didn't have the time to trade blows with Candy, even if he wanted to. If you look closely, every punch Ralph throws is aimed at the battlefield, not Candy. Maybe Candy realized he was punching the ground for a reason (even if he didn't know what reason) and pulled him up so he wasn't able to, then noticed Van about to die, which is where "let's watch her die" came in.
Turbo's a victory junkie, which is what started this whole mess in the first place. He wants to savor Ralph's defeat at his own claws/hands, not just sit back and watch it happen.
Maybe it would end this way. But the first levels of an arcade are usually the easiest ones, so by the time the villain won, they would have lost several times.
And the bigger deal isn't that the villain never wins, it's that the villain (specifically, Ralph) is treated like slime and gets no respect for the work he does despite being the second most vital (if not THE most vital) aspect of the game. As is proven when Ralph "goes Turbo," no Ralph means no gameplay.
Not to mention, if Ralph wins, that means he's forced to wreck the building even more than he already has in regularly gameplay. The Nicelanders certainly aren't going to like him for that.
How would laserdisc games with live actors (like Mad Dog McCree) exist in this universe? Do they inhabit GCS with the other characters?
Most likely they'd be seen for what they really are — a recording/simulation of the live actor, projected into a digital world.
What happens to the audience in sports and fighting games when the arcade closes? Do they "go home"?
Probablly. Games like Sugar Rush are big enough for deleted courses and stages (the Volcano). So to feature local housing for audience memebers isn't far-fetched either.
How did Vanellope end up in the "Fungeon," anyway? After Ralph wrecked her kart, she went back into Diet Cola Mountain, through an entrance that only she and Ralph knew about. So how did she get caught?
Presumably, King Candy had someone watching—or just watched himself—to make sure that Ralph went through with it. Recall that the very next thing we see in that area is Sour Bill sweeping up the kart's remains. Plus she was yelling and screaming — not exactly being a stealth master.
It's also possible that Candy was originally content with Ralph destroying the kart, but Vanellope tried to interfere as his men were in the process of sweeping up the pieces, as she didn't want the last remnants of her precious kart to be taken away from her. And so she was captured and locked up in order to keep her out of the way. Candy knows that she can't make another kart without Ralph, so there was no need to go out of his way to try and capture her, but since she was already there, he figured, why not?
It's obvious from what we see in the movie that arcade characters, just like regular people, need to take a break from work and rest every now and then: they hang out at Tapper's, or even sleep (Ralph mentions he sleeps in the dump and Vanellope made herself a bed in her volcano lair). For the characters in this movie, that is no problem since the arcade they are in closes at night. But what about arcades that are open 24/7?
Maybe the games in arcades that are open 24/7 use Tag Team Twins?
Just because it's open 24/7 doesn't mean it's always full of people. Characters could take turns catching quick naps in-between games during the slow hours and leave one or two awake at all times keeping an eye on the customers so they could wake everyone up quickly if someone came to play their game.
Also, where is this so obvious? I haven't played many games, especially arcade games, where you're required to eat and sleep on a consistent basis in order to keep your character alive and functioning. It's more likely eating and sleeping are things they do when they have nothing else to do - when Ralph is at the Bad-Anon meeting and we see him making himself a bed out of bricks, he doesn't really look tired as he does it. He's just there because he has nowhere else to go.
What are cutscenes? Presumably they happen at least once, and then after that are the characters acting, or are they sort of like prerecorded footage? Does Ralph's stump get moved and the Niceland Apartments get built every time someone plays?
They are acting, it's doesn't seem to be pre-recorded though the only evidence we have of this are a few scenes. One is when the arcade closes and all the characters leave work. If it's the real Ryu and Ken on the attract mode for Street Fighter it seems probable that it's the real them in cut scenes. The other is when Felix notices Ralph is missing and stands there stalling for a moment during what would have been the cut scene (or what passed for one on a Donkey Kong game) of him wrecking the building. To the second question its probably a little bit of both. The Nice Landers building is destroyed everytime the game starts and even if/when Felix loses it's repaired once the players leave. It's possible that they have a number of sets in the game as well with Ralphs's stump being one such set and Nice Lander home being another. Similar to a play. That's how I imagine Street Fighter is right down to the Vs screen effectively being a curtain while they bring out the Chun Li set. Alternatively it can and has been destroyed multiple times and that brick pile Ralph lives on is the remnants of times when he's won and managed to completely destroy the building.
I wasn't sure where I should put this...Sour Bill knows how to get into Sugar Rush's code, correct? If he does, why didn't Ralph just have him lead him into it, bring Felix along, and then give Vanellope's code a whack with his magic hammer? That would've fixed it, wouldn't it have?
I assumed that since Sour Bill worked for King Candy/Turbo, Ralph decided not to trust him.
The hammer couldn't have broken the seal on the lost memories, though. At best, they'd have restored Vanellope's memory and eliminated her glitching, but she'd still be an outcast in Sugar Rush: she'd just be thought of as "that nutcase who thinks she's a princess" rather than "that glitch".
In-universe, how do console and computer video games work? And are characters inside of it alive at all? If they are, what happens when you take CD out of your console/computer?
Isn't save data from computer and (some) console games stored on the computer/console itself? If I'm correct on this, then presumably the characters could walk around inside the computer/console, but would only be capable of returning to their game upon it being reinserted. This probably means it's a lot more dangerous than being in an arcade, where several games can be plugged in at once and aren't unplugged very frequently.
Maybe, maybe not- all of the games exist on the computer's hard drive, but only one can be loaded for the player at any given time- maybe they just have craploads of free time? Personally I feel like consoles and computers might be safer for game-jumpers, assuming the owner is arguably aware of their "subjects" like the arcade owner seems to be. Just keep a bank of backup copies on a protected hard drive- personified in-universe by some sort of Clone Bank with Brain Uploading. Hilarity Ensues when the characters vacation in a Dark Souls expy, with a full minute of the same character popping out of the backup drive nonstop.
What are the implications of PC-modding in this universe?
I can't think of a specific example to list, but I'd really love to see the gang jump into the local Skyrim or Fallout knockoff and find out the player is running a Wreck-It Ralph total conversion.
Probably something akin to Reality Warper abilities would be utilized.
In a more story-centered game, would a character as they exist after-hours already know about any plot twists or surprise backstories before the player uncovers them in-game? Like, say, if someone were playing Ocarina of Time, just as an example, would Link spend his off-hours time thinking he's an actual Kokiri at first, or would he already know the truth about his mother and the Deku Tree? And how would save data affect that character, then? If a file gets erased, would he have to keep living through The Reveal over and over again?
It is my belief that, in a story-centric game, it would be treated akin to a play. Every character would have a script, and have probably spent lots of time "rehearsing" their roles as the game was being developed. So it's likely that they already know how the story is going to play out, and they continue to perform the play as many times as needed. A save-file erase just means "Okay, people. Let's take it from the top," and they start the play over again.
This has been touched on a bit already, but why don't the games utilize Kayfabe or Mean Character, Nice Actor in regards to their villains before the events of the film?
Maybe some of them do; not every cabinet is going to have the same issues that Ralph's does (where it seems to be that the Nicelanders, ironically enough, take Ralph's job a little too personally.) The other villains at the Bad Anon group didn't say specifically that they're outcasts the way Ralph is, it might just be that acting like a villain for so long can get a little depressing for a genuinely good person (such has happened in real life.) Otherwise, it's probably difficult to keep Mean Character, Nice Actor in mind all the time when your entire life revolve around your game and your game puts you at an antagonistic relationship with the villain.
I think it can be argued that at the beginning of the film, Vanellope's problem that she has to overcome is a bit heavier than Ralph's is, as she lacks a proper role in her game and even mentions how its other characters refer to her as "just a mistake," which is a pretty deep and emotional concept for a kids' movie. But in the end, Vanellope doesn't really do anything to change the minds of the other characters or change the way they see her - she just turns out to not have been a glitch all along. I realize that this may have been the film's intention, but it never addresses the moral implications of treating glitches like that, or why it's wrong, or how they can be treated differently, so what does that say about the lives of other glitch characters that exist in other games in the arcade? The movie brings up the issue like it's going to be addressed, but never actually does so.
Considering that the only glitch character we see is a result of someone else tampering with the game's source code, whose to say that there are other glitch characters? At least, ones that are as fully formed and intelligent as Vanellope? Ralph certainly hasn't met one since the details have to be spelled out for him by King Candy (who, it must be said, is lying through his teeth) and he's been around for thirty years.
What would happen if there was a blackout? Would all the characters be deleted since their games aren't active?
It's never indicated that being unplugged deletes the characters in the game or that they wouldn't return to life once power was restored - the main reason characters fear being "unplugged" is that if their game is declared out of order, it means it's being unplugged for good.
This is about the peanut brittle stalagmites in Vanellope's hideout. When building that race track for Vanellope, Ralph made a smooth and clean track with the camera zooming out to show what he accomplished in creating. But then, Vanellope's race track consists of peanut brittle stalagmites sticking out of the ground? And afterwards, Vanellope when finally driving her car doesn't have any of those peanut brittle obstacles anymore!
Ralph probably broke off a couple of them from around the track (there's plenty outside the racing circle) and placed them there.
Why does Ralph try to get Vanellope to drive through peanut brittle stalagmites on her practice course? This is her first day learning how to drive.
They're a stand-in for practice cones. She wasn't driving through them, she was driving around them. Is there any reason why she shouldn't learn how to steer around obstacles when she's learning to drive?
Considering the kind of racing game Sugar Rush is, learning how to avoid obstacles is pretty much a necessity. Not to mention that, while yes, this is her first day learning to drive, it's also a one-day crash course (if that, considering she's trying to get ready to participate in a race that's happening that night.)
How does self aware games like Undertale work in the Wreckitverse?
I imagine that the self-aware characters are always self aware, or doesn't care about Kayfabe.
, it's "Wreck-It Studios". It's hinted that this is a development team working for Tobikomi, likely with the specialty of making more modern, "gritty" types of games. The name is probably intended to be a reference to the game Fix-It Felix Jr. and Ralph himself; he's one of the most popular characters in Tobikomi's library of games.